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Hostage Language & Future Slave Semantics
Sorrows of Childhood No. 10: a survey of child bondage imbedded in our Mother Tongue and slavery to come
© 2021 James LaFond
JAN/18/21
When word origins are noted, one will see the majority having entered usage between the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, which placed the people of England in the grips of slavery and the beginning of Plantation America, in 1607, during which many laws against being poor and homeless were enacted concurrent with laws that made people homeless and poor called "enclosure acts." The brief glossary below constitutes the semantics of European-American enslavement over some 800 years. Searching certain word origins online has recently become more troublesome as the campaign to change the meaning of words and hide the past beyond a wall of semantics ramps up.
-1. Rogue, a wandering beggar; a vagrant, origin of rogue: First recorded in 1555–65; origin uncertain, apparently short for obsolete roger "begging vagabond," originally thieves' jargon, synonym study for rogue
-2. Beggar, one who requires or asks for assistance, a criminal by this act in the Plantation Era
-3. Vagabond, an unbound or masterless person, a criminal by virtue of having no master
-4. Knave, boy, male child; male servant
-5. Ragged, shabby, poor a ragged and sometimes stupid person, origin of ragged first recorded in 1250–1300, from the Middle English word ragget. Its earliest known literary use is in William Langland Piers Plowman, in which it appears as the name of a demon.
-6. Incorrigible, from the French, meaning beyond corrective measures, such people to be made slaves for life
-7. Pauper, poor, from the Latin for small means, a person without rights or liberties or a headstone for
their grave
-8. Potter’s field, biblical origin, a common grave for strangers, criminals and the poor
-9. Lad, a male child of a family
-10. Lass, a female child of a family
-11. Boy, a male servant to a master
-12. Girl, a female servant to a master
-13. White, a sex slave of European origin held in Non-Christian bondage
-14. Slave, a slave of European, and originally Slavic origin, held in Non-Christian bondage, an Arabic term based on the trade in Slavic women
-15. Servant, an unfree person attached to a master, from the Latin servile
-16: Serf, is a slave of the land, attached to a location, and under the power of the owner, a Christian morale work-around to excuse slavery according to the fiction that the land owns people as an expression of God’s will
-17. Bond-man, bond-woman, bond-servant, an unfree person attached to a master
-18. Indented, an unfree person attached to a master who will not be freed until his two-part, perforated
[indented] release form is given to him and countersigned
-19. Freedom papers, a paper signed by a magistrate or by three propertied men asserting that the bearer is not a runaway and is of good character
-20. Freeman, a freed person who has no property and therefore has no rights, including no right to vote
or assemble
-21. Urchin, a ragged child of poor character that should be enslaved
-22. Likely, appearing to have the makings of a useful person
-23. Naughty, with naught, of bad character and subject to punishments including death and abduction
-24. Rubbish-men, human trash, naughty, a man who has failed to produce “fruits” according to the biblical definition and therefore, through lack of prosperity has proven to have displeased God and is liable for use by men who God has blessed with fruits
-25. Waste-men, human trash, naughty, origin of term white trash
-26. Hoe-wife, a woman bought as a laborer-sex-slave in Maryland, circa 1700
-27. Bound, bound-over, a person held in bondage due to abduction or judicial decree or sale by a parent, to be transported to a place of purchase and service
-28. Orphan, child of a deceased parent, c. 1300, from Late Latin orphanus, parentless child (source of
Old French orfeno, orphenin, Italian orfano ), from Greek orphanos, orphaned, without parents,
fatherless; literally deprived from orphos, bereft
-29. Half-orphan, a child with one parent
-30. Peazel a bull penis used to beat male Christian slaves by non-Christians
-31. Thrall, unfree person from the Norse
-32. Thralldom, the state of being owned and unfree
-33. Enthralled, owned by a more powerful person
-34. Maid-servant, an unfree female attached to a woman of means
-35. Employee, an unfree person to be used as a tool from the French
-36. Gaol, jail
-37. Gaoler, jailer, with arrest powers external of the facility, to include the countryside, where he may abduct any person not travelling with freedom papers
-38. Workhouse, a work site for the housing and toil of unfree people
-39. Prison, a holding facility for people to be executed or sold
-40. Asylum, place of refuge, sanctuary, from Latin asylum, sanctuary, from Greek asylon, refuge,
fenced… in other words, a prison operated under the fiction of charitable care for the inmates
-41. Runagate, someone who has escaped a prison or gaol
-42. Runaway, an escaped unfree person
-43. Lambast, to beat or whip
-44. On the lam, a runaway from a cruel fate, chiefly beatings as indicated above
-45. Renegade, 1580s, apostate, traitor, unbeliever, turncoat, rebel directly from Medieval Latin
-46. Chattel, from the Latin caput meaning head of cattle. It was not possible, in a half hour of online
searches, to find the first use of this term in English, as it is described exclusively in terms of African bondage, despite the Latin root. I have examined a document in the Maryland Archives which refers to people of three races as "chattel" in 1707. Yet these three online dictionaries are resistant to a definition or origin beyond African bondage.
Editor: If the editor can find a first mention of the use in English, we will possibly discover that it was used
prior to enslavement of Africans, which might be the reason for the academic obfuscation here found in standard sources.
-47. Transport, an unfree person bound-over on a ship
-48. Convict, an unfree person designated as unfree according to judicial decree specifically a punishment for a crime
-49. Redemptioner, a person owned by a ship’s captain, either because they failed to pay for their passage, agreed to be sold in return for passage, were defrauded after paying for passage, a family member of theirs died in passage and the survivor was billed for their death and sold to compensate the captain, or because a relative in America had agreed to liberate their family member via payment to the Captain upon arrival.
-50. Apprentice, a youth given to a skilled person as a servant by his parents with the understanding that the boy would be taught a useful trade and released after a certain period of time had been served or a certain amount of money had been earned in the trade and paid to the master, an unfree student occupied in a trade
-51. Savage, from the French meaning the people who live in the woods, with no racial designation
-52. Heathen, people of the "heather" or the wild uplands in the British Isles, which came to be associated with not being Christian and was then applied to Indian tribes of mixed Amerindian and European racial stock in 1600s New England
-53. Freight, an unfree person held below decks
-54. Half-freight, an unfree child held below decks
-55. Wench, interestingly, though we are taught in America that this is a term for African American women, even this PC dictionary source which resists sourcing chattel to uses prior to the African Slave Trade, gives this: Origin of wench 1250–1300; Middle English, back formation from wenchel, Old English wencel child, akin to wancol tottering, said of a child learning to walk; akin to German wankeln to totter
This is simply another term for child under the power of adults that became attached to unfree adult women during the Plantation Era.
-56: Squaw, young Algonquin woman, identical meaning as Senorita in Spanish, not an insult
-57. Ward, the Old English name derives from an occupational surname for a civil guard/keeper of the watch, or alternately as a topographical surname from the word werd, meaning marsh. By the Plantation Era, ward meant the person under the watch of another, such as used in the medical ward, "a ward of the state," and applied to orphans under the care of an adult guardian. Root of the word warden, the official who runs a prison. Ward, will, I think, in the future, be expanded as a medical term for unfree person much as serf was used as an agricultural term for unfree person, justly unfree, under corporate ownership.
-58. Rights, government enforced privileges due the elite
-59. Cracker, from the Gaelic to crack the whip, originally on cattle, then to have the whip cracked upon the cracker as he "gets cracking" to his task, and ultimately the overseer who wields the whip
-60. Liberty, the latitude to dispose of one's property—including human property—without government interference
-61. Kidnapping, originally the practice of abducting Scottish children for sale as servants

Terms for unfree person today and in the future:
-1. Inmate, convicted criminal
-2. Resident, a person housed in an assisted living facility with legally limited egress
-3. Citizen rather than person, already designated on government I.D. application forms, with U.S. citizens
having already less rights and services, and more burdens and limitations than U.S. persons [resident or
illegal aliens]
-4. Patient, legal ward of a medical establishment
-5. Customer, legal ward of a company
-6. Client, legal ward of an expert
-7. Denier, one who denies media truths such as shamdemics, eleckshuns, weather fluctuations, and will be medically or judicially assigned as a ward to a company, expert or agency
-8. Parolee, a designation which will be extended to people in violation of social norms, such as failure to
wear a mask, media denial, etc.,
-9. Consumer, as a term, will, in the future carry a liability of some kind
-10. A term for an unvaccinated person, who will occupy a quasi-criminal niche beyond the credit and social services and banking networks, will be coined by 2030.
-11. Outpatient, or some other term used to describe a person who has submitted to vаccination or gender reassignment and maintains an obedient relationship
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nc     Jan 19, 2021

Fantastic!
Johnny Redux     Jan 21, 2021

That was a very interesting read. It was good to be reminded of these word origins, especially slave and cracker.

I am sure that some miss the old serf days, when people could be arrested for having the audacity to wander about the countryside without their "freedom papers". I guess we will just call those "victory passes" in the near future, to make us feel better about it.

Thank you.
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