The Volokh Conspiracy

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Crime

Shouting "Fie!" in a crowded Boston meetinghouse

|The Volokh Conspiracy |


Prof. Josh Blackman quotes a funny story from Nathaniel Philbrick's "Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution":

Bostonians in the eighteenth century had a decidedly different accent from the British, especially when it came to the pronunciation of the letter [R]. Instead of "Fie!" (a colonial-era word used to voice opposition to something) they heard the officers shouting "Fire!" Mistakenly fearing that the meetinghouse was about to be consumed in flames, they began to run for the doors as others leaped out the first story windows.

And things go downhill from there—check out the whole post.

Eugene Volokh is the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA and a Visiting Fellow (Senior Fellow starting May 2024) at the Hoover Institution (Stanford). Naturally, his posts here (like the opinions of the other bloggers) are his own, and not endorsed by any educational institution.