Each week The Sun's John McIntyre presents a relatively obscure but evocative word with which you may not be familiar, another brick to add to the wall of your vocabulary. This week's word:
PAROLE
Those of you who recall fragments of your high school French will recognize that parole (pronounced puh-ROLL) means "speech" or "word."
Adopted into English in the seventeenth century, its earliest sense is "word of honor," the word, or assurance, that one gives as a promise.
In military senses, it developed into parole of honor, the word of honor that a prisoner gives not to escape, or to refrain from further combat for a specified period. In the Civil War, when officers were assumed to be gentlemen of honor, captured officers were allowed liberty of movement or permission to go home, on parole.
That sense has developed into the modern meaning of the conditional release of a prisoner, and the terms of that release, violations of which will land the prisoner back in the big house.
Words are wayward, and parole took off in a slightly different direction in the eighteenth century, as a watchword or password. That is the sense in which Boswell quotes Dr. Johnson as saying, "Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world." (When Johnson visited Paris with the Thrales, not fully trusting his spoken French, he conversed in Latin with other learned men.)
Example, the modern sense: From a 2012 USA Today article: Department of Corrections report shows that 515 of the 1,095 prisoners released in 2007 had returned to prison by 2010, violating parole either by committing new crimes or breaking rules of their parole — they didn't check in with their parole officers, drank and associated with criminals.
Example, the historical sense: From an 1858 article in Harpers on Ethan Allen: "Mr. Lovell was soon afterward exchanged and set at liberty, but Colonel Allen was only admitted to parole within the limits of the city."