Talk:Send to Coventry

2007-11-6 Automated pywikipediabot message
--CopyToWiktionaryBot 17:33, 6 November 2007 (UTC)

Origins
I reverted the first paragraph of text on the origins of the phrase to its previous wording. The phrase does have an unknown origin, but it is also commonly believed that it involved the treatment of Royalist prisoners during the English Civil war. There is even a public notice outside St John's Church that sits between Fleet Street and Hill Street that repeats this story and says that the prisoners were kept in St John's Church ... or was it that they were paraded to pray there ... I forget :-D

Anyhow, I regard the complete replacement of the first paragraph of the Origins section to have been vandalism, though we could do with some proper citation of the "popular beleif". Ecadre (talk) 00:51, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

Synthesis
The passage (lacking sources and identification of to whom "some" refers) "Some have suggested that the idiom derives from the ostracism that became a fate of Coventry's legendary "Peeping Tom". However it is surprising that there is no recorded use between the 1050s (the origin of the tale) and the first possible example suggested by the Oxford English Dictionary, dated 1647. Furthermore, there is no support for this derivation in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1981), the Oxford English Dictionary (1986), or Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1961)." runs counter to the guideline at Wikipedia:No_original_research#Synthesis_of_published_material- "Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources."

The conclusion- viz. "Coventry's legendary 'Peeping Tom' has nothing to do with the derivation of 'to send to Coventry"- cannot be considered to be explicitly supported by the absence of mention of such a connection in the sources listed, unless these included a statement to the effect of the conclusion, which they evidently do not. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.144.64.4 (talk) 15:34, 12 February 2020 (UTC)

Another claimed etymology
John Camden Hotten's Slang Dictionary (1873) says, "Coventry was one of those towns in which the privilege of practising most trades was anciently confined to certain privileged persons, as the freemen, etc. Hence a stranger stood little chance of custom, or countenance, and to send a man to COVENTRY came to be equivalent to putting him out of the pale of society." 2A00:23C5:FE0C:2100:B157:1E3E:21B4:5EFD (talk) 08:33, 19 April 2021 (UTC)