Cycling Through Obscurity: One Word's Trip Back from Obsolescence · 10:33pm Feb 13th, 2021
EDIT: Images should now work for everyone, and not just most-one. Lemme know if they still don't work for you!
I started reading a book earlier this week: The Steel Bonnets, by George MacDonald Fraser. The author is best known for his wonderfully entertaining Flashman series of fiction (and here on FiMFic, you might also be familiar with Tumbleweed’s excellent pastiches of Flashman, starting with The Prisoner of Zebra. They are, to repeat myself, excellent. But I digress), but he also did a bit of nonfiction writing. If you’re ever interested in a book about the Scottish and English Marches (i.e. border counties) at their most lawless, this is a well-sourced book by an incredibly able wordsmith.
But I’m not writing this blogpost because I read a good book. I’m writing it because when I started that book, I discovered a frankly baffling aside just a thousand or so words into the introduction. After telling us, of the vast numbers of outlaws and robbers that populated the area in the late middle ages and early renaissance, that, “History has christened them the Border reivers,” Fraser drops in the following footnote:
*Reiver, reaver—robber, raider, marauder, plunderer. The term is obsolete, but lingers on in words like bereave.
Well. I’ll admit that “reaver” (the spelling I’m most familiar with, though Fraser uses reiver throughout) isn’t a word I use every day, but I’d hardly call it obscure, and I certainly wouldn’t think it merits a footnote justifying its use. And “obsolete?” Hardly!
So I let that sit until today. And now that it’s the weekend and I have a little time, I thought I’d look at this word.
You won’t be surprised to learn that Fraser wasn’t just talking nonsense. The Steel Bonnets was published in 1971, so the first thing I did was run a Google ngram to see how often the word was used in writings that Google has archived in the last 50 years (or rather, from 1969 to 2019. Close enough!). Here’s what it showed:
So, the first thing I love about that is that you can very clearly see the bump in “reiver” in 1971 when The Steel Bonnets was published. But more than that, we can see that in the last two to three decades, use of both words, but especially “reaver,” has increased dramatically. Here it is with ten-year smoothing:
Ignoring the bump his own work caused, reaver/riever have seen about a 400% increase in usage. So the next question is: why?
Looking back at the year-by-year chart, there’s a big spike in reavers in 1998, after which it remains volatile, but never remotely approaches the consistent near-non-usage of previous decades. And from a little poking around, it seems like two completely unrelated things happened that year to bring the word a little farther forward into our lexicon. A piece of fantasy fiction, and a video game.
The former was George R.R. Martin’s A Clash of Kings, published in November 1998 (it didn’t make it to the US until early ‘99, but Google doesn’t seem to care about that). The third book in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, a.k.a. “What Game of Thrones was nominally based on, at least for the seasons that didn’t suck,” Clash was the first book in the series to deal extensively with the Iron Islands: a hard, sparse land inhabited by a bunch of Viking-esque raiders. If you’ve been paying any attention to this blogpost so far, you will not be surprised to learn that Martin refers to these Iron Islander warriors as “reavers,” and does so frequently. ASoIaF is one of the biggest things in modern fantasy, and it's no surprise both that readers picked up the word, and that other fantasy authors began making more use of it. Or that Martin himself continued to use it; you can clearly see the bumps around 2005 and 2011, when he released the fourth and fifth books in the series.
The second thing that happened was that Starcraft came out in March of 1998, and had a unit called the Reaver. I discounted this initially, because video games, amirite? But a little looking has convinced me that Starcraft is indeed responsible for at least part of that 1998 bump, and probably has had a measurable impact on the long-term growth of the word reaver. When you look at other semi-obscure words that were used as unit names in that game, you can also see a ‘98 bump, and 21st-century growth!
Okay, not a gigantic bump, but a visual one, followed by a clear increase in usage through to the present. That seems like too big a coincidence for me to countenance; apparently, people learn new words through video game vehicle names. And Starcraft being as big a game as it was (is?), I guess it’s not a surprise that some of its language has filtered into general usage, at least a bit.
Incidentally, what if we go back in time a little farther? Say, look at the last 200 years, instead of the last 50?
Throughout the 1800s, we see the words reaver and reiver being used largely to describe the people of the English/Scottish Marches, though occasionally any random band of violent brigands get labeled with the term (and a few times an English author decides that every Scot ever born qualifies), with the former falling out of fashion in favor of the latter, before it too begins to fall out of the lexicon for lack of use. In light of that long, steady decline, and a good three generations or more spent in total obscurity, the relatively-recent resurgence of the word is all the more surprising to me.
But that’s the funny thing about words; we keep coming up with new uses for them. Sometimes it’s a true change of meaning, as from “violent brigand” to “video game unit.” Sometimes it’s just a change of surroundings, as from “violent brigand in a specific historical context” to “violent brigand in a more general fantasy context.” But a good word is always useful, and one never knows when it might be called on again.
Interesting insights all around. I wonder what other terms future generations will dig out of obscurity for general use?
Also reminded me of this:
pics.me.me/desplatsniki-foriov-follow-1920s-slang-we-should-bring-back-for-31283842.png
You can also see a little bump for reaver in 2002 and a much larger one in 2005, which were respectively the release dates for the series Firefly and its sequel film, Serenity. The plot of the latter involves a group of mad, sadistic humans, who attack from the edges of inhabited space, called Reavers.
The evolution of a language is a strange, beautiful, and often confusing thing. Lovely example of such.
I am the descendant of Border reavers on both sides of my family, and I heartily support this post!
(And funny thing; the spellchecker here doesn't recognize reavers or reivers!)
Unfortunately every one of your embeds shows "Unsupported format" on my screen, so I can only see the text. However, thank you for the interesting post! A few semi-connected points that came to mind:
1) The Fighting Fantasy series of solo gamebooks (basically Choose Your Own Adventure with dice and fighting) was enormously popular over here in the 1980s, easily outselling CYOA itself in the UK. One of the most popular spinoff titles was The Riddling Reaver. That was published in 1986 and was probably where I first came across the word as a kid.
2) The border raiders are nearly always spelt "reivers" in the UK, to the extent that iisaw's use of "reavers" in that context actually threw me for a moment. If you type "border reavers" into Google (at least the .co.uk one) it shows you the results for "border reivers" by default.
3) In modern British usage, certainly English usage, "the Marches" on its own is generally understood to mean the area along the Welsh/English border. It's unusual to see it used about Scotland these days, as "the Borders" or similar is more common for that.
5453659
I genuinely did not realize that "heebie-jeebies" was not still common usage. It feels exactly as normal to me as "freaks me out" or the like!
5453665
Makes me wonder where Whedon picked up the word; one of the '98 sources I pointed out, or something else entirely? That's the great/terrible thing about language; you can never quite be sure who was influencing who...
5453668
Sorry to go on a tangent here, but have I ever told just how nice it is that you always seem to drop by everywhere on FiMFic with something pleasant to say? And not just pleasant, but relevant, that makes it clear you actually read the blogpost or story and are contributing the conversation? Well, you do, and it is, and I've noticed, and I'm not the only one who appreciates it. You're a damn treasure, FoME.
5453699
Oddly enough, I've got Scottish and English family ties on both sides, but nothing at all from the borders... which I guess means my family has your family surrounded!
5453710
Sorry the formatting didn't work out! I had a little trouble embedding, but I thought I'd gotten it sorted... anyway, thanks for the UK insight! Over here in the US, I can confirm that most people don't really know what "Marches" are generally, let alone the Welsh Marches (or just "The Marches") specifically--it's certainly more obscure here than "reaver!" Which makes me wonder why we've moved away from that. If nothing else, I wish we could stop calling Texas/New Mexico/Arizona "The Southwest" and instead christen them "The Mexican-American Marches!"
5453723
I've heard it used once or twice, but it's definitely not common parlance.
Also seconding your tangent. 5453668 never fails to improve a comment section.
5453723
"Heebie-jeebies" isn't in common usage? I love that term!
Wheedon is a big Shakespeare fan, so I was sure that's where he knew the term, and googling it to see how it was spelled back then, I noticed that Faulkner spelled it "reivers" for what that's worth. In fact, by far the majority of hits I got involved The Reivers.
As for Shakespeare, he used it as a verb, a shortening of bereave. (e.g. "Had you that craft to ’reave her of what should stead her most?")
The OED says it came* from Old Norse.
"Surrounded," eh? Keep a sharp eye on your cattle, laddie!
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* i. e. was stolen by English reavers.
5453723
FOME gud :B
i just shitpost relentlessly
An interesting rundown, Chris. I suppose I learned the word from Starcraft, then.
5453659 I recently got into Call of Cthulhu (the roleplaying game). We've had no shortage of old-timey slang.
My personal favorite is "banana oil"; nonsense or lies. As in, "That's banana oil!"
I'm having the same issue as 5453710 in none of the graphics loading for me.
I've only encountered that word a couple of times. Well, I guess 3. I have played Starcraft, but it's been a long time, and I don't remember that unit name. There's a somewhat obscure British composer named Sir Granville Bantock who wrote a short but intense piece called "The Sea Reivers." I bought the CD for the "Hebridean Symphony" on there, and this turned out to be an unexpected bonus.
The other means it in a different sense of reave, which is closer to "cleave." It must have been around 1999 or 2000 when Might & Magic VIII came out, and I played that whole series from III until it ended with IX. I gather the spin-off Heroes of Might & Magic battle strategy games were much more well known, but I never played any of those. Anyway, the best two-handed sword you could get in VIII was called a Headsman's Reaver. I wonder if there was a little bump due to that.
5453723
I live Worcestershire, and I'm less than 20 miles from Ludlow Castle. In Tudor times that castle was the HQ of the Council of Wales and the Marches, so possibly the word is a bit more common around here than it would be somewhere like East Anglia. You wouldn't see it every day, and it's not really in casual usage, but I think most people with at least a moderate interest in British history would know it.
On another note, I associate myself fully with the comments in support of FOME. A wonderful asset to this place and to the fandom as a whole. Thank you!