Etymology Bites #2: From Coventry to Limoges

A few years ago, I found myself with a few hours to kill as I waited for a friend’s plane to land at Coventry airport. As I wandered around Coventry’s depressingly quiet city centre, almost completely devoid of life on a Sunday afternoon, it felt like I had quite literally been sent to Coventry.

“To be sent to Coventry” is an English idiom that means to be ostracised or ignored. The origins of the expression are somewhat murky, but they seem to date back to the English Civil War. According to some accounts, royalist soldiers captured in nearby Birmingham were sent to Coventry (a stronghold of parliamentary forces), where they were treated very poorly by the locals, who were incited to avoid them at all costs. In any case, by the end of the 18^th century “being sent to Coventry” is described as an army punishment where officers refused to speak to the offender, and the expression apparently entered the vernacular with its current meaning soon after.

Of course, nowadays the British army has banned cruel and unusual punishments such as sending people to Coventry, but interestingly there is a French word with military origins that also came from the ostracization of soldiers: “limoger.” This word originated at the start of the First World War when, following a series of disastrous defeats, General Joseph Joffre ordered underachieving senior officers to leave the front, sending them not to Coventry but to the provincial town of Limoges. The verb has since evolved to mean relieving anyone of their responsibilities.

There is also the Russian equivalent, “to be sent to Siberia,” which is a reference to prison camps in the frozen northern Russian tundra famously exploited by Stalin through the gulag system — an altogether more harrowing prospect than being temporarily marooned in the nondescript English midlands or being packed off to a charming town in west-central France.