A word coined for one Prague window now unseats prime ministers
Three men thrown from Prague Castle in 1618 survived the fall, and the term that records it keeps the violence a plain “removal” loses.
The throwing of a person or thing out of a window, and by extension a swift dismissal or expulsion from a political party or office.1
A window at Prague Castle
Most words for getting rid of a person are polite. Defenestration is not. It names one thing, throwing someone out of a window, and it was coined for an afternoon when three men went out of one together.
On 23 May 1618, in a council room of Prague Castle, Protestant estates seized two Catholic regents of the emperor, Jaroslav von Martinicz and Wilhelm Slawata, along with their secretary Philip Fabricius, and put all three out of the window into the moat below.2 The men suffered no serious injury, and the Bohemian revolt that opened with them is where historians begin the Thirty Years’ War.3
Miracle or manure
How they lived was argued over at once, and the argument fell along the same line as the war. The Catholic account written soon after, preserved in the Documenta Bohemica, reports that the Virgin Mary appeared in the air above Martinicz and caught him in her spread cloak.2 The competing explanation stays closer to the ground: Protestant writers countered that a heap of manure in the dry moat broke the fall. Michael Quinion, tracing the word, sets the two readings side by side and settles neither.4
The contemporary account puts the drop at thirty cubits, about forty-five feet into the dry moat,2 and Quinion records the same figure.4 What made the episode worth retelling is the part every account keeps: the fall was long, and nobody died.
An act older than its name
Prague had done this before. In 1419, during the Hussite upheavals, a crowd led by the priest Jan Želivský threw the councillors of the New Town Hall from its windows, and the Hussite Wars followed.5 About seven of them did not survive the crowd waiting below, killed on its spears rather than by the fall.6 So the act the 1618 nobles performed already had a local habit behind it. What it did not yet have was a name.
The name is younger than the event by a year. It is built from Latin, the prefix de-, meaning down or away, and fenestra, window.1 English first records the noun in 1619, in a line about “the defenestration of the Counsailours” — the Prague councillors themselves.7 The word entered the language already pointing at the afternoon that produced it.
The violence the word keeps
The literal sense came first, and the figurative one grew out of it across the twentieth century, without a clean starting date. The word turned humorous around 1900, Quinion records, and drifted toward its present use for pushing a person out of a post.4 Merriam-Webster now gives that figurative sense, a swift dismissal from office, as the more common of the two.8
What the figurative word keeps is the manner. A resignation is chosen. A dismissal is administrative. A defenestration is done to someone, in public, against resistance, and it is not gentle. When the governing party removed Boris Johnson as prime minister in July 2022, after some fifty ministers resigned in two days, the word that fit was the violent one.9
“the party is always quick to defenestrate a leader if its grip on power is threatened.”9 Oren Gruenbaum, The Round Table, on the removal of Boris Johnson
Sources
- Merriam-Webster · “defenestration”
- German History in Documents · “The War Begins: The Defenestration of Prague, May 1618”
- Encyclopædia Britannica · “Defenestration of Prague, 1618”
- World Wide Words · “Defenestrate” (Michael Quinion)
- Encyclopædia Britannica · “Prague’s History of Literally Throwing Authority Out the Window”
- New World Encyclopedia · “Defenestrations of Prague”
- Grammarphobia · “Defenestrate”
- Merriam-Webster · “Word of the Day: Defenestration”
- The Round Table · “Boris Johnson: the defenestration of a British prime minister”