After Trump loyalists stormed the Capitol, observers talked of “insurrection” and speculated about a further attempt on inauguration day. But “insurrection” is of course an old word for an old thing, of which Britain does not lack historical examples.
The first recorded use of “insurrection” in English, indeed, is in parliamentary papers describing the armed revolt led by Jack Cade in 1450, who marched on London to protest against the corruption of Henry VI’s government. It comes from the Latin insurgo, meaning “to rise up within”: so insurrectionists are, etymologically, the same as “insurgents”, even if that is normally a word for those who do not meekly accept western military rule.
If, on the other hand, we approve of an armed uprising against another country’s government, we might call those involved “rebels”. Indeed, it was noticed long ago that any such word implies a moral evaluation, as the English historian Henry Thomas Buckle wrote in 1858: “Insurrections are generally wrong; revolutions are always right.” Thinking more metaphorically, his American contemporary James Russell Lowell wrote: “It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of intelligence.” Had he lived to the year 2021, he might have changed his mind.
• Steven Poole’s A Word for Every Day of the Year is published by Quercus.
