On Gentlemen
Octavia Mallard, OAM
Gentle, Gentile, Genteel, and the riddle of Manliness
To say gentle once meant “well-born, noble, generous” is to forget its other kin: gentile and genteel. Three sisters of the same root, who wandered into different houses.
Gentile—in the Latin, simply “nation,” the people who are not us. To the Jews, the heathen; to the Christians, the pagan; to the Moslems, the infidel. Thus a word that first meant “belonging to a group” soon meant “belonging to the wrong group.”
Gentle—nobility by birth, later by conduct. But watch how it slips: from “noble” to “kind,” from “kind” to “tame,” from “tame” to “pliant.” A horse, once spirited, becomes “gentled.” To be “gentle” is to have one’s rough edges pared away until one no longer resists. The nobleman and the domesticated beast are, in language, uneasy companions.
Genteel—the faint perfume of gentility. A simulation, a fashion, a costume. To be genteel is not to be noble, but to arrange oneself so as to appear noble. It is surface without depth, conduct without root.
Each shows the same drift: from lineage to behaviour, from behaviour to affectation, from affectation to parody.
And then we are offered manliness. What is that, except the constant comparison of men with other men? The word has no meaning except in contrast. To be “manly” is to perform what others deem masculine, which changes from age to age.
In the sixteenth century, manliness is courage, constancy, martial bearing. In the nineteenth, it becomes moral probity, self-restraint, the stiff upper lip. By the twentieth, it can be nothing more than avoiding faintness at the sight of blood or ordering the right drink at the bar.
What is constant is not the quality but the surveillance: one man observing another, measuring his likeness against an imagined ideal. To call a man “manly” is not to describe him but to place him within the gaze of other men.
And polite, too, plays its tricks. Once from politus—polished, smoothed, burnished—it meant refinement of the surface. A polite man was one rubbed free of burrs, able to slide through company without offence. But polish can also be a mask, concealing flaws beneath a gleam.
So a gentleman may be gentle in the sense of pliant, gentile in the sense of outsider, genteel in the sense of pretender, manly in the sense of comparative display, and polite in the sense of polished to blandness. All the words dissolve if you touch them too firmly.
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