Word: guillotine
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Ever since 1789 when Joseph-Ignace Guillotin advocated swift and painless decapitation as a way to put people to death, the guillotine, designed by others, has served as a uniquely French form of capital punishment. During the French Revolution hundreds of heads were lopped off, and the crowds came early to get a good view of such victims as Danton and Robespierre. In all, the guillotine was used some 4,600 times. Public executions were banned in 1939. In the past decade, the blade fell only six times, the most recent in Sept. 1977 when Hamida Djandoubi was dispatched...
...guillotine is not French and was not named for its inventor. (The several-hundred-year-old device was merely advocated by Dr. Joseph Guillotin, who opposed the prevalent methods of torture and execution. After the Terror, Guillotin's family changed its name...
...Ignace Guillotin, anxious to ease the condemned's suffering...
...Charles Ill's eldest son, Charles Henri, who became the Roi Soleil of the dynasty. Progressive as well as dedicated, he was enthusiastic over a new invention described to him by Drs. Antoine Louis and Joseph Guillotin and on April 25 1792, he tried it out. The Parisian crowds cried, "Bring back the block," but Charles Henri Sanson was well pleased. "Simplicity and absence of noise," he said happily, after the test...
...expression "go to the dickens," a Victorian nice-nellyism for "go to the devil." But Dickens' perpetually optimistic Mr. Micawber produced micawberish and the pompous Mr. Bumble lent his name to incompetence forever after. Similarly, a hangman named Derrick is immortalized in hoisting devices, French Physician Joseph Guillotin in a machine which struck him as more humane than the ax, and be-trousered Suffragette Amelia Bloomer in billowing pantalets. It is a process that has never stopped, concludes Partridge happily-from Solon, who became a synonym for lawyer, to Mae West, who became a life jacket...