Daniel J. Cleary

On Defenestration

While teaching a college English composition class recently, a student offered this bon mot: “I babysat my brother’s daughter over the weekend, and by Sunday afternoon I wanted to throw her out of the window.” I replied, “You wanted to defenestrate your niece?” He and the rest of the class were confused, so I wrote the obscure word on the white board and explained what it meant. We then agreed on two things: 1, “defenestrate” is a fascinating word; and 2, this student should not be allowed to procreate.

I first encountered the word “defenestration” in a humorous, satirical article in The Onion that discussed how GM’s new “neckbelts” might cause “defenestration of the head.” Even though I’d never seen that word before, I was able--as a student of Latin--to know that the term meant something about windows. And the “de-” part lead me to deduce that it probably meant heads being thrown out of/and or through windows. (I also, as a teenager, used to find humor in the fact that one of the producers of The Cosby Show was named Carmen Fenestra, which in Latin means “song window”--but that’s another story.) So, when I looked up “defenestrate” in the dictionary, my hypothesis was confirmed:

de`fen´es`trate Pronunciation: de`fe~n´e~s`tra¯t

v. t. 1. to throw (something or someone) out of a window.

So, I began thinking about the English language: particularly, how we just might have a word for everything. Or at least a shorthand phrase. For instance, I have a box of jumbo paper clips in front of me, and the French translation on the box involves twelve words, one of which is “trombones.” I’ve asked a French teacher friend of mine to translate it literally, and it comes out to something like “large-sized trombone-shaped metal clips that hold pieces of paper together.” In this case, there is an economy to the English “jumbo paper clips” compared to the French version. Do we, however, need a word like “defenestrate”? Do we throw things out of windows on such a regular basis that we need a single word to describe this action?

Then, I Googled “defenestration”: tons of Prague references. Apparently, twice in two hundred years, Bohemian citizens literally threw many members of parliament out of the windows of their governmental buildings. (Here we just keep re-electing them; I’m not sure which is crueler.) Thus, we have many references to the first and second defenestrations of Prague--the last of which happened almost four hundred years ago. So, Michael Jackson and his baby notwithstanding, why the need for “defenestration” now?

While I know that the English language contains more words--by far--than any other language, due to our ever-increasing multiculturalism, do we need “defenestrate”? Is there a word for hurling feces at someone? Unfortunately, yes. Several. I could list many of them, but propriety, and my girlfriend’s mom, prevents me.