"Asylum"
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Like me, you may have been puzzled by Donald Trump's repeated references to Hannibal Lecter in his rally speeches. Given the contexts, I figured it was a connection between "political asylum" and "insane asylum" — and Miles Klee has the receipts ("Why Is Trump So Obsessed With Hannibal Lecter?: A Complete Timeline", Rolling Stone 7/30/2024):
How an off-script moment from early in the election cycle led to a bizarre MAGA ritual celebrating a fictional cannibal
[…] How did Trump end up name-checking Lecter as part of his pitch to the MAGA base? Responding to a request for comment on the matter, campaign communications director Steven Cheung replied, “President Trump is an inspiring and gifted storyteller and referencing pop culture is one of many reasons why he can successfully connect with the audience and voters. Whereas, Kamala [Harris] is as relatable as a worn-out couch.”
Absent any further explanation, a forensic review of the former president’s speeches over the past year is in order. What’s clear is that this all began with a simple misunderstanding — or several.
You can read the whole article for the detailed timeline, Trump's non-canonical Hannibal Lecter descriptions, and a final speculation about the connection:
Political observers outside the MAGA faithful still want to understand the connection Trump keeps making between the border issue and The Silence of the Lambs. Some have wondered on social media whether Trump initially conflated the term “insane asylums” with the concept of “asylum seekers” — that is, migrants fleeing persecution and human rights abuses in their own countries. The Trump campaign’s description of the GOP nominee as “an inspiring and gifted storyteller” neither confirms nor dispels this theory.
I have no idea whether Trump is confused about the difference between "political asylum" and "insane asylum", or just expects or hopes that his audience will be. But since this is Language Log and not Political Psychiatry Log, let's look into the usage history and the deeper etymology.
The OED's first entry, dated to 1439, is
1.a. A place of sanctuary for criminals and debtors, offering protection from legal retribution; a place of refuge and protection from the law. Now historical and rare.
Then, from 1596,
1.b. gen. A secure place of refuge, shelter, or retreat.
From 1842,
2.b. Protection and (usually temporary) permission to stay granted by a state to a refugee, esp. a political refugee, from another country. Cf. political asylum n.
And also, from 1775,
3.b. spec. A secure institution or establishment for the confinement and treatment of people diagnosed with severe mental illness; a psychiatric hospital. Also: a prison for mentally ill criminals. Now chiefly historical.
recorded earliest in lunatic asylum n.
Terms such as psyciatric hospital [sic] are now generally preferred.
The OED's etymology:
< classical Latin asȳlum refuge, sanctuary < Hellenistic Greek ἄσῡλον refuge, sanctuary, use as noun of neuter of ancient Greek ἄσῡλος (adjective) safe from violence, inviolable < ἀ- a- prefix + σύλη, σῦλον (usually in plural, σῦλαι, σῦλα) booty, seized cargo, (in Attic) right of seizure, perhaps < συλᾶν to strip off, to rob, plunder (if this is not from the noun); ultimate origin unknown.
And you may enjoy perusing the Greek stem's relevant entries in Liddell-Scott-Jones, which include
- σύλη "the right of seizing the ship or cargo of a foreign merchant",
- συλάω "strip off (esp. the arms of a slain enemy)", and
- συλεύς "privateer".
I should note in passing that Steven Cheung's "relatable couch" simile raises rhetorical puzzles of its own…
Philip Taylor said,
August 1, 2024 @ 8:57 am
Your OED may be older than mine, Mark — I have, as first attested usage :
J.W. Brewer said,
August 1, 2024 @ 9:04 am
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_asylum.
Because the international-refugee sense of "asylum" is a feature of international law, English usage may have been affected by usage in other once-diplomatically-significant languages, like French, in which certain persons may have a droit d'asile. Whether French "asile" had the same range of other meanings and uses as English "asylum" is not known to me, although wiktionary suggests that "asile psychiatrique" is an extant phrase.
Mark Liberman said,
August 1, 2024 @ 9:05 am
@Philip Taylor:
The current on-line version of the OED, from which I took the glosses, is by definition the most recent version — and here's an image of its first asylum entry (not that it really matters…):
KeithB said,
August 1, 2024 @ 9:22 am
"Whereas, Kamala [Harris] is as relatable as a worn-out couch.”
The trump campaign should stay away from couch analogies.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 1, 2024 @ 10:05 am
I was curious as to whether the Greek etymon ἄσῡλον might turn up in the Septuagint's description of the "cities of refuge" in the Old Testament which fit in well conceptually with the early English semantics of "asylum," but instead that turns out to be (e.g. in Joshua 20:2) πόλεις τῶν φυγαδευτηρίων, with the nom. sg. φυγαδευτήριον glossed in one source as "a place of safety, refuge or protection" and derived either from a verb meaning "to flee" or a related causative verb meaning "to banish." I guess the implicature from the etymology was that if you flee and/or accept banishment to the specified place(s) you'll be safe. The Vulgate, FWIW, has "urbes fugitivorum."
Rick Rubenstein said,
August 1, 2024 @ 4:50 pm
So Kamala Harris is… extremely relatable? I mean, I may not want a worn-out couch, but boy can I ever relate to it.
Sergey said,
August 1, 2024 @ 5:20 pm
I don't think anyone is in any confusion about asylum (although I guess it can be a neat joke). The reality of illegal migration is that it's driven by criminals, many of them completely deranged.
To give a simple example from popular fiction, have you seen "The Sopranos"? It shows very well how the Mafia soldiers are deranged, have a very disturbing moral compass. So that compared to most of them Tony Soprano is a relatively nice guy – severe but fairly reasonable. Well, compared to the criminals coming in the illegal migration even the characters of Pauli (a guy who kills his mother's friend in search for a few thousand dollars, and also kills and almost gets killed in a scuffle that starts when he breaks another tough guy's remote on a whim) and Ralf (a guy who kills his stripper girlfriend on a whim under drugs) can be described as "severe but fairly reasonable".
And if you wonder about Kamala, it's a reference that she had, well, "worn out many couches" in her political career.
David Morris said,
August 2, 2024 @ 2:43 am
In Australia, Canberra is sometimes referred to as a political asylum.
Philip Taylor said,
August 2, 2024 @ 3:34 am
"The reality of illegal migration is that it's driven by criminals" — I could not disagree more, Sergey. The reality of illegal migration is that it is driven by a grossly inequitable distribution of the world’s resources. If you lived in a subsistence-level country and saw the possibility of moving to a country where the streets appeared to be virtually paved with gold, would you too not leap at the chance ? The people smugglers (and I am forced to agree that their actions are criminal, but only because they put so many lives at risk for personal gain) would not even exist were it not for the fact that we continue to make legal migration a virtually impossible goal …
Philip Taylor said,
August 2, 2024 @ 4:14 am
I do not dispute for one second, Mark, that "[t]he current on-line version of the OED […] is by definition the most recent version", but is it the best version ? I would argue strongly "not" and others support this view (see URL at end). But to demonstrate the inferiority of the current version (and overlooking the weaknesses of the user interface, which defaults to a tabbed view) compare and contrast the entries for "sesqui-" in the current online and the previous version. The current online version starts :
while the second edition (which I have on CD-ROM, and which I use by choice) has :
Where has the etymology gone from the current online edition ? Why has it been omitted ? There isn't even a tab for etymology in "tabbed view", any more than there is any mention of "sesqui-" being a prefix (it is glossed as a "combining form").
An informed critique of the current online edition can be found at https://thelifeofwords.uwaterloo.ca/new-look-oed/. Bear in mind that it was at the University of Waterloo that the OED was originally digitised (1984 et seq.), so if even they find fault with the current edition I think that should tell us something.
Neil said,
August 2, 2024 @ 5:11 am
As a comedian once said, calling lunatic asylums psychiatric hospitals is madness gone politically correct.
KeithB said,
August 2, 2024 @ 8:25 am
Sergey:
To pile on to what Phillip Taylor said, I suggest 2 movies:
A recent one: Love in the Time of Migration
An older one: El Norte
Seth said,
August 2, 2024 @ 11:27 am
Sometimes I wonder at how the entire liberal intelligentsia seems to be utterly baffled by anything outside of their very isolated culture and modes of speaking. Trump is doing a "bit", like a standard-up comedy act. That article documents how he tries out the material at performances, and refines it over time. The subtext is that illegal immigrants are like Hannibal Lecter – they seem nice, but they're dangerous criminals. And he wraps it up with the punchline of "love to have you for dinner", playing off the double meaning – being neighborly, vs murderer. Again, this is nasty, xenophobic, stuff. But it's not incomprehensible. If someone was of that political view, they might even find it very funny. Yet there's article after article that seems to to take the perspective that since the writer doesn't get it, it must be babbling nonsense.
David Marjanović said,
August 2, 2024 @ 1:15 pm
That completely fails to explain why Trump has said inmates of mental hospitals in Mexico are illegally immigrating into the US in order to get into the mental hospitals there.
Philip Anderson said,
August 2, 2024 @ 3:36 pm
@Seth
So you think it’s a “dog-whistle”, appealing to his target audience while being inaudible to his more analytical opponents? Sergey has obviously got the subtext.
Seth said,
August 2, 2024 @ 6:02 pm
@ Philip Anderson – It's more like the opposite of a "dog-whistle". It's not meant to be inaudible, and they don't care if the opponents hear it. But the opponents can't comprehend it. I don't know what would be a good term, perhaps "bird-song". Here I'm thinking of a cartoon where the joke is that birds singing aren't making pleasant music – they are actually saying some fairly rough talk, like "I'm a good sex-partner" or "Don't mess with me, I'm tough".
It's also not about being "more analytical". Rather, it's like listening to a comedy routine where they can't grasp the context of the performance. Have you ever run across clips of, e.g. decades-old talk-show monologues on YouTube? Or read an extremely old newspaper humor column? And it's all about people, events, controversies which are completely incomprehensible to you? That's the idea.
Tom Dawkes said,
August 3, 2024 @ 3:06 am
On the broader view of 'asylum', it's worth noting that in Italy 'sail' is the word for 'nursery school'.
Tom Dawkes said,
August 3, 2024 @ 3:10 am
Italian 'ASILO'.