In 1699 Abel Boyer published a dictionary with the unusual characteristic of a three-sentence title: “The royal dictionary. In two parts. First, French and English. Secondly, English and French.” In that dictionary you can find this entry: “Pill-garlick, a pitiful sneaking Fellow out of Countenance.”
It wasn’t long before “pill-garlick” became the word “pilgarlic.” It never achieved widespread usage, but popped up here and there, up until recently. In 1894 the humorous magazine Punch included “No! ’tis Bull is pilgarlic and martyr.” Pilgarlic showed up in the Mansfield Ohio News-Journal in 1935: “A stained and seedy pilgarlic who sits beside his display without soliciting.” And in 1996 you could have found this in the London Times: “Our divide between fat cat and poor pilgarlick.”
The word doesn’t have any connotations that are obvious to us today, but when it first appeared in the 1500s there was less doubt about what it meant, because it was not originally a single word, but the phrase “peeled garlic: “He will soon be a peeled garlic like myself.” What it meant was baldness, so the top of one’s head resembles a peeled clove of garlic.
The way a humorous description of baldness acquired an implication of a “pitiable, lowly, shabby, or unkempt person” shows up in a citation from 1619: “The Hunting of the Pox: a pleasant Discourse betweene the Authour and Pild-Garlike, wherein is declared the Nature of the Disease, how it came, and how it may be cured.” (That really is the title.) In any case, the key is in “the hunting of the pox”. One reason you might have gone bald in those days is because you had caught “the pox,” which is what they called venereal disease.
Over time, a couple of things happened that are connected (sort of), but in weird and random ways. Cures were found for venereal disease, so it became less likely for people to be seen walking around with “the pox.” Thus baldness ceased to be seen as a symptom of the pox, and possibly because life spans were increasing, baldness became more often a side effect of aging. And “peeled garlic” became “pilgarlic,” a word whose original form is not immediately obvious.
The end result was that the notion faded away that a “pilgarlic” was a bald guy who could be ridiculed for the disease he might have.What remained was just a handy insult based on “that guy looks a bit different than us, so that must be bad.” But never mind, it’s time to get back to the kitchen and start peeling the garlic.
