Q: I recently saw this headline on The Hill: “Reuters beclowns itself, to Hamas’s benefit.” Beclown? This is my first exposure to the word. Any thoughts about it?
A: We’re not surprised that “beclown” is new to you. Although it’s been around for more than 400 years, the word isn’t all that common now and never has been.
Collins, the only standard dictionary that recognizes “beclown,” says the verb has two senses in British English, one archaic and the other standard:
“In British English (bɪˈklaʊn) verb (transitive) 1. archaic to make a fool of (another), to make into a clown; 2. to clown around, make a fool of oneself.”
The collaborative dictionary Wiktionary defines “beclown” as “to make a fool of,” and cites examples where the fool can be oneself or others. Here’s one of each sense:
“to answer their arguments would be to play their game and beclown onself” (from The Irrelevant English Teacher, 1972, by J. Mitchell Morse) … “he suggested that I had ‘beclowned’ him” (The Virtual Marshall McLuhan, 2001, by Donald Theall).
Yes, the verb “beclown” is alive, but it’s barely breathing when compared with the expressions “make a fool of” and “clown around,” according to Google’s Ngram viewer, which tracks terms in digitized books.
The earliest (and only) citation for “beclown” in the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological reference, is from an early 17th-century satirical poem in which a group of women meet in a private room at a tavern and complain about their husbands.
The past participle “beclown’d” means “made a fool of” in this expanded version of the OED citation (from A Whole Crew of Kind Gossips All Met to Be Merry, 1609, by Samuel Rowlands):
“O wretch, O Lob [fool], who would be thus beclown’d? / I deserue better for two hundred pound. / Two hundred pound in Gold my Father gaue, / To match me with this miserable Knaue.”
The OED says the verb “beclown” combines the prefix “be-” (meaning “to make”) with the noun “clown,” similar to the use of the prefix in the verbs “befool” and “besot” (originally, to turn into a sot, or drunkard).
When the noun “clown” first appeared in the mid-16th century, the OED says, it referred to “a person from the countryside; a peasant, an agricultural labourer; spec. (disparaging) one considered to lack good manners, education, or intelligence.”
The dictionary’s first citation is from a long-running debate in broadside ballads involving the authors Thomas Churchyard, Thomas Camel, and others:
“We were here in quyet all, vntyll you came to towne: sence that we could not liue in reast, for suche a contrey clowne” (from A Playn and Fynall Confutacion of Cammells Corlyke Oblatracion [Camel’s cur-like scolding], 1552, by Churchyard).
The OED says the noun soon came to mean “a character in drama, or employed by a court or prominent household as an entertainer; spec. one with characteristics of a stereotypical peasant, whose ignorance, unsophisticated behaviour, or nonstandard speech is intended to amuse an audience.”
The first Oxford example, which we’ve expanded here, is from The Right, Excellent and Famous Historye of Promos and Cassandra (1578), a play by the English dramatist George Whetstone:
“For to work a Commedie kindly, grave olde men should instruct: yonge men should showe the imperfections of youth: Strumpets should be lascivious: Boyes unhappy: and Clownes should be disorderly.”
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