Jonathan Swift was a writer in the 1600s and 1700s who’s still famous for satire. He wrote Gulliver’s Travels, which nowadays most people think is a children’s story about a guy who somehow ends up in a land full of little tiny people, the Lilliputians. Really, though, the story about the Lilliputians is just one chapter of the book, and the Lilliputians themselves are a satirical rendering of people concerned with ridiculously trivial matters.
Swift was so good at satire that his style, which was to present an absurd idea in a completely deadpan, serious style is called Swiftian. But Swift wasn’t just a satirist. He was also The Very Reverend Jonathan Swift, the dean of a major church in Dublin. And besides that, he was a bit of a curmudgeon who published complaints about, among other things, how people were using (or misusing) words and language.
He published an article in The Tatler in 1710 where he railed against some words that were apparently fairly recent jargon:
“…certain words invented by some pretty fellows; such as banter, bamboozle, country put, and kidney, as it is there applied; some of which are now struggling for the vogue, and others are in possession of it. I have done my utmost for some years past to stop the progress of mobb and banter, but have been plainly borne down by numbers, and betrayed by those who promised to assist me.”
He was particularly irked by “banter,” which at the time was mostly used as a verb, and meant making fun of someone. Swift never explained just why he thought so little of the word, and by the time he started complaining about it the word wasn’t even all that new; it had been in use for at least forty years. But he complained about it again a couple of years later:
“[Banter]…was first borrowed from the bullies in White-Friars, then fell among the footmen, and at last retired to the pedants; by whom it is applied as properly to the productions of wit, as if I should apply it to Sir Isaac Newton’s mathematics.”
There might be a bit of a clue in that last passage — Swift himself was one of the leading “producers of wit” at the time, and it could be that he took umbrage at having his work referred to as mere “banter,” which means (in its noun form) an often funny back-and-forth exchange that doesn’t really mean much. That’s just a guess, of course, because there doesn’t seem to be any record of anybody calling Swift’s satires “banter.”
It’s possible that Swift was quite right about “banter” having been invented by “bullies in White-Friars”, mostly because nobody has any better idea where the word might have come from. “Bullies in White-Friars” probably meant what we would call gangsters — there’s an area of London still called Whitefriars, and in Swift’s time it was known as a pretty sketchy neighborhood that decent folks would avoid, particularly after dark. And don’t forget that one of the other words Swift objected to in The Tatler was “mobb” — maybe, as an upstanding member of the clergy, Swift was really just complaining, in his own Swiftian way, about the organized crime of the day.
