THE AMATEUR WORD NERD: Don’t accept an invitation to a noyade

By Barbara McAllister

Word of the Day: Noyade
Trust the French to have a wonderfully elegant word for an extremely inelegant concept. Think of abattoir and trebuchet, beautiful words associated with death and destruction. So it is too with noyade, from the French word noyer, “to drown.” Noyade has the narrower and darker meaning of execution by drowning or deliberate mass drownings.
The word is a by-product of the French Revolution, when in 1793 it became an efficient way to dispose of the hundreds of prisoners being held after the counterrevolutionary uprising. The republican leader, Jean-Baptiste Carrier, became infamous for his use of mass drownings as a means of execution. He found it neater, easier and more sadistic than the traditional firing squad.
The first mass drowning involved 90 Catholic priests, who were arrested, taken to the docks and loaded onto a barge specially made with rails so they couldn’t jump overboard. The barge was towed to the middle of the Loire and sunk by opening valves in the side. Later, Jean-Baptiste developed other ways to make the drownings more gruesomely entertaining by tying men and women together. During the Reign of Terror these executions were popularly referred to as “republican marriages,” “bathing parties” or “national baptisms.”
While noyade technically refers to execution by drowning, the word is rarely used today except in the specific context of the executions during the Reign of Terror. Consider it a positive sign that we no longer have need of the word other than in history books and crossword puzzles.