Brand-New & The Origin of Brand Name

Brand-new is old. The compound adjective appeared in print more than four hundred years ago. At first, brand-new described newly struck swords hot from the armourer’s forge.

A brand was a sword and sword-new was something all shiny and fresh. Brand-new.

Shakespeare had used “fire-new.” Old English brand ‘act of burning something’ is cognate with German Brand and Dutch brand. The same root, modified, appears in our English verb burn and in its German synonyns brennen and verbrennen. The second verb was used − notoriously − by Hitler when he cackled for joy at the first report that German troops has reached the French capital during World War Two. Hitler screamed, “Verbrennt Paris?” “Is Paris burning?” is the usual translation, but verbrennen suggests more than mere burning. “Is Paris being totally incinerated?” is what Herr Schickelgruber meant.

Like most words that endure over many centuries in a language, brand added new meanings. It came to mean a burning log or stick, the “flaming brands” of old adventure stories. From brand-new, it reacquired the meaning ‘sword.’ Thus the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote of “the brand, Excalibur” when he named King Arthur’s magic sword.

By 1400 CE, during the era of Middle English, the verb brand meant to burn with a hot iron for identification. The first things branded in English were human beings. Convicted criminals, even harmless wanderers, had their flesh seared with the branding iron.

In the Tudor period of English history, vagabonds had the letter V burnt into the skin of their chests.

Fray-makers in church, heathen roisterers with no respect for holy space, received an F, the hard way.

A British law in the reign of King William III ordered thieves to be branded on the left cheek.

In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe reminded Americans of how they treated African slaves when one black character had been branded in his right hand with the letter H.

Branding of criminals was not abolished in England until 1829. In the British army, as late as 1879, cads and bounders who had the bad form to desert were branded with a big D just under the left nipple. The army’s “bad characters,” in a further show of Victorian solicitude, had the initials BC burnt into their bodies.

Branding horses is at least as old as the Dorian invasions of ancient Greece, and probably much older, perhaps reaching back to humans’ first herding of wild horses. Branding domestic animals began with agriculture. Sheep were early branded with hot pitch, until the gentler marking of ruddle came into English use. Ruddle or reddle was a red ochre or red chalk used to mark sheep with identifying brands. In Thomas Hardy's novel The Return of the Native, the rough, red-stained Diggory Venn is a reddleman, a character of ancient masculinity, so earthy and virile that he frightens the stupider rustics who think of him in his redness and raw power as one of Satan's hoard.

The first use of brand in print as “brand mark” to mean trademark occurred in 1827, when such proofs of ownership were burnt into wooden casks of wine and liquor, then into timber, metal, and finally printed on paper products and labels. From there, brand names took off, ushering in not only protective trademarks but also centuries of legal battles to protect such names. The blizzards of paper produced by litigious brand owners fills Americans courts to this day and provides cozy livings for emPorsched squadrons of avarice-greased lawyers.

© 2007

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