draconian

Some people’s attitudes towards minor transgressions of grammar, spelling, punctuation, or similar niceties can be a bit drastic. Dramatic. One might even say… draconian. Prescribing cruel punishments for misplaced apostrophes. Breathing fire on those who would use a word inappropriately.

Such as using a word that’s a legal allusion for non-legal matters, perhaps?

I may be reaching a bit here, but I can’t help but think that the “decimated means reduced by ten percent, you vulgar barbarian” crowd might feel that since draconian originates in a particularly severe legal code – one that prescribed the death penalty even for some kinds of theft, and enslavement for failing to pay debts to one’s social superiors – the broader use of draconian, as in (to cite a few common examples) “draconian security measures,” “draconian environmental measures,” “draconian austerity measures,” “draconian spending cuts,” and “draconian budgetary policies” might be worthy of censure. Or whips, chains, forced servitude, gruesome death, that manner of thing.*

To be sure, draconian is still used in the strictly legal sense too. I’m editing a book on the Qin Empire in China, which was spectacularly expansive and spectacularly short-lived (221–206 BC), and the author has much to say about its “draconian principle” in law, whereby if a judge had several options for punishing a misdeed, the most severe was always to be chosen. Not only that, if a judge was more lenient, he could himself be subject to the punishment he was supposed to have given.

Great way to preserve social order, eh? As long as people are afraid of punishment, they’ll be good. 

Well, either that, or they’ll lie a lot. All the time. 

In the Qin Empire, couriers for priority government communications could be fined severely for being even a little late, so they often faked arrival records. But never mind that – breach of filial piety (e.g., being rude to your parents) could be punishable by death, and the onus was on the parents, as the offended parties, to report the transgression. You can see that many parents might decide to let a bit of youthful insolence be dealt with at home rather than see their child (however nasty) be executed. Oh, but if someone found out that a child had breached filial piety and the parents had not reported it, the parents would be punished! Not by death, but severely nonetheless. 

So if you wanted a decent kind of social order where impulsive progeny were not regularly slaughtered wholesale, it relied on a whole web of deception, the weak point of which was anyone who was too inhuman, too intimidated by authority, or both.

But while those who lack mercy may be rewarded with fear, they get little respect, and people will take opportunities to displace them. Cruelty eventually has to eat what it has planted. Which was one factor in the demise of the Qin Empire (not the only one, mind you; when you expand your empire too quickly, you tend to lack the resources and logistics to sustain its periphery; to make up for a lack of public servants in the peripheries, the Qin commuted many penal sentences to forced servitude in government postings in remote locations, which turned out about as well as you may guess).

So now think of the more draconian prescriptivists of English. The teachers who brook no “barbarisms.” The authors of rigid and intolerant guides to English, people who gleefully enfranchise frank rudeness in social contexts (unsolicited corrections of others’ speech) and even vandalism (“correcting” public signage). Sure, people carry corrections in the backs of their heads, and may even be “on their best behaviour” linguistically when there is any threat of censure, but no one enjoys this except the people issuing the corrections – and, if we can be honest, they don’t seem happy about it either. The most gleeful and joyous use of the language is often in the infractions! And nuts to the old dragons.

Speaking of which. Draconian can be defined as ‘of, like, or resembling a dragon’. So is this term related to the laws lain down by dragons of lore, cruel and inflexible and breathing fire? No – the use we make of it is based not on a dragon but on a person named after one: the Athenian lawmaker named Drákōn Δράκων, rendered in Latin as Draco. He was the one who, around 600 BC, set down the Athenian legal code, the one I spoke of up in my third paragraph, which could have you killed for filching a cabbage.

Well, I speak of Draco as a person in good faith, but the lore may be in bad faith; it’s possible he was a mythical creation, a fictitious person to whom was attributed the works of unknown real persons. At any rate, though, his name was a proper noun, and so draconian is an eponym. And, for those who wish to be fussy, the distinction between ‘dragon-like’ and ‘harsh in punishment’ is a distinction between draconian and Draconian.

Indeed, if you look at the Oxford English Dictionary (entry last updated 1897), the entry is capitalized: Draconian. But also, the OED doesn’t include the ‘dragon-like’ definition with that entry. On the other hand, it also doesn’t include the more common definition, either. Its definition of Draconian is simply “= Draconic adj. 1, 2.”

Yes, in the view of the OED, the preferred adjective is not draconian or Draconian but Draconic (or, I suppose, for the ‘dragon-like’ sense, draconic, though they don’t say so). Never mind that their own usage charts show draconian being used orders of magnitude more often than draconic; those charts have been updated recently, while the definitions have not.

But if you are the sort of person for whom “the old ways are the best ways,” you may well prefer to go with 1897. Or perhaps even 600 BC or 221 BC. But before you get too Draconic in your prescriptions and penalties, take note that Draco’s laws were repealed not long after his death – and those of the Qin Empire were also softened by the Han dynasty that replaced it. When punishment is not so much the means as the end, those who are mean will soon enough meet their ends.

* I once had someone say “I hope you die a horrible death” to me for my article suggesting we would be better off without apostrophes. I know that they were deliberately overstating the matter, but still…