Pedestals

Someday maybe I'll remember to forget.

— Bob Dylan

Three historical figures were knocked from their pedestals this week: the mariner Christopher Columbus, the British slave trader Edward Colston, and the Confederate president Jefferson Davis.

Many historical figures are on unsure footing right now. They'd better watch out: when the mighty fall, they fall fast and hard.

The word pedestal, meaning a "base supporting a statue," was borrowed in the 16th century from the French piédestal. The French in turn borrowed their word from the Italian piedistallo. 

Pied is Italian for "foot;" stallo, for "seat;" so pedestal literally means a "seat for the feet." When someone is "knocked from his pedestal," he's not having his feet knocked out from under him, but his ego taken down a notch—likely because he's fallen from favor.

When a prominent figure fell from favor in Ancient Rome, he sometimes really fell. Disgraced emperors like Caligula, Domitian, Nero and Geta were doled out a punishment worse than death: oblivion, a brutal sentence that centuries later came to be called damnatio memoriae—the "condemnation of memory."

For their crimes, every memory, every trace of the condemned was obliterated; they were literally erased from history. Statues of the condemned were destroyed; pictures of them, buried; coins bearing their images, melted; homes where they lived, razed; possessions they once held, burned; and inscriptions of their names on buildings, defaced.

Lenin after the collapse of the USSR

Although Rome disappeared, the practice of damnatio memoriae didn't.

In modern times, Benedict Arnold suffered damnatio memoriae. So did Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Zhao Ziyang and Sassam Hussein.

Each of these figures lost not only his pedestal, but his pedigree, meaning an "individual's family history."

The word pedigree comes from the medieval French term pied de grue, meaning "foot of the crane." 

French genealogists of the day used a three-prong symbol on their charts to show the line of descent of a noble family. One day, a genealogist noticed the symbol resembled a crane's foot, so named it pied de grue. 

The English borrowed the term in the 15th century to mean "line of descent" or "family history," but soon corrupted it, and now we say pedigree.