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SugarMyChurro -> RE: Defenestration (5/25/2007 5:00:13 PM)
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Defestration
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[pronounciation omitted] [mod. f. L. de- I. 1, 2 + fenestra a window: so in mod.F.]
The action of throwing out of a window.
Defenestration of Prague, the action of the Bohemian insurgents who, on the 21st of May 1618, broke up a meeting of Imperial commissioners and deputies of the States, held in the castle of the Hradshin, and threw two of the commissioners and their secretary out of the window; this formed the prelude to the Thirty Years' War.
1620 Reliq. Wotton. (1672) 507 A man saued at the time of the defenestration. 1837 Southey Lett. (1856) IV. 521, I much admire the manner in which the defenestration is shown [in a picture]. 1863 Neale Ess. Liturgiol. 238 Which commencing at the defenestration of Prague+terminated in the peace of Westphalia.
Hence (as a back-formation) de"fenestrate v. trans. (usu. joc.), to throw out of a window; de"fenestrated ppl. a. (in quot. 1927 punningly = ‘windowless’?).
1620 H. Wotton Lett. (1907) II. 199 Two of the defenestrated men. 1915 Lit. Digest 20 Mar. 668/3 The word defenestrate means ‘to throw out of the window’+but there is no good authority for its use. 1927 C. Connolly Let. 27 Apr. in Romantic Friendship (1975) 298 Prague+seemed a good place, gloomy and defenestrated. 1958 J. C. Herold Mistress to Age (1959) xii. 246 ‘I am like the Irishman who kept coming back until he was thrown out of a fourth-floor window.’ So confident was she of not being defenestrated that she rented a house at 540 rue de Lille. 1974 Publishers Weekly 30 Sept. 52/2 Anne Ramsdell, a brilliant math professor at Oxford,+escapes death by stabbing but is thrown out of her third-story window.+ Anne meets and falls in love with the man who had defenestrated her at Oxford.
- From the OED, 2nd Ed., 1989
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