Beyond the Pale

If there was one thing the Romans were really good at, it was building roads. If there was one more thing, it was building fences.

These two items were at the top of the Roman army’s agenda whenever it decided to conquer a new territory, which was more or less all the time. Fences were made of stakes in the ground called pali (plural for palus), and they were important if you wanted to keep out these people or those people.

Eventually, palus would give us the word palisade, with the idea of fortification being the underlying common thread. We also got the word impale, and you can probably see the strong connection there without any specific examples.

Okay, maybe just one example

Gradually, the word pale came to mean a fixed boundary of sorts, like a fence.

One famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) pale was in Ireland, and it began during the reign of King Henry II, when a boundary around Dublin was created. This was a region in Ireland where England had managed to keep a foothold after establishing a situation where, as I put it:

The lords had to provide soldiers and money to England, and in exchange, Henry would protect them from outside invaders.

Over time, this region began to be called the Pale. By the 1400s, this was a common way to describe the region in writing.

Metaphorical meanings cropped up over time, and before you knew it, going out beyond the pale meant that you were leaving the civilized area, going out into the frontier. Out here, you were vulnerable to attack, and English law could not be counted on to protect you. The lack of legal protection became a big part of what folks were afraid of if they went outside that fenced zone—beyond the pale.

Going outside a safe zone, without legal protections, was dangerous. Similarly, going outside of social norms can be dangerous. Over the next few centuries, this social norm-busting meaning became the main way people used beyond the pale. It wasn’t life-threatening, but it was extremely distasteful.

This theme of the boundary between civilization and wilderness—the frontier—describes so much of my family’s past, and so much of my own life. The Romans, English, and Irish all created a boundary region for the Ulster Scots, who then went over to the colonial Americas and into a completely different type of frontier.

Some of these people even influenced the foundational documents of the United States of America, getting involved with an entirely different frontier.

In my own life, I keep finding myself at the edge of discomfort—my own frontier. Breaking norms and defying conventions I don’t think make any sense has been with me my entire life, but it really leveled up with punk rock and the culmination of puberty.

Going out beyond the pale is a way to shock people into remembering that the pali may be of our own making. Is it really deadly out there, or have we just been behaving that way for our entire lives? This is a question worth asking from time to time, although I don’t think most people ever really get around to asking it.