‘Get the sanctions’, Amsterdam folk boys shouted at each other in the late 1930s, the dialectologist Jan Berns reported in 1993. What it exactly meant remained unclear, but it is clear that it was an alternative to ‘get the clothes’. Sanctions and cholera, the original form of the clothes, were apparently so remote from everyday life, and so common in the vernacular, that both words could be used curtly.
Sanctions were something new in those days. Mussolini had invaded Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, and the right-thinking world community responded with comprehensive sanctions for the first time. That was new, and George Bernard Shaw, the author of Pygmalion and notorious whitewasher of political usurpers, had put the word in quotes when, in his 1919 political commentary, Peace Conference Hints, he warned against “outlawing and economically boycotting recalcitrant nations” through “sanctions.”
Sanctions are negative in our everyday language. Sanctions, on the other hand, are not. King William I announced in 1818 that he would like to sanction certain measures that had obtained the approval of parliament. This seems at first sight a strange contradiction, on the one hand punitive measures, on the other hand approval.
Saint status
Sanction and sanction both have their basis in French and Latin. One sanction was originally only an affirmation, an approval, and hence an ordinance or a regulation. The verb sanctioner did not really differ in meaning and can therefore be translated as ratify when it comes to official treaties. Later, we write the 17th and 18th century, could with sanction In both French and English, the punitive measure that stood for non-compliance with a law can also be indicated. It is only a small step to the coercive measures that we have designated with sanctions since the beginning of the last century.
Sanctioning has not yet gone down that road in Dutch. However, in French and thus in Belgian Dutch one also finds statements such as ‘sanctioning the Russian leader’ and that does not mean that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is approved. On the contrary.
Sanction goes back to the Latin verb sancire which stands for ‘to make holy or inviolable’ and in a next phase ‘to establish something solemnly by law’ and thus ‘to issue a law’. From sancire comes sanctus, saint, the basis for our word saint. In our view, that is quite a long way from sanctions. But this may be different for Russians, who have no other source of information than the state organs, so that they see the imposition of Western sanctions against their leader Putin as confirmation of his saint status.