I’m currently reading a book called The Russian Revolution by William Henry Chamberlin. This book was originally published in 1935. One of the things I love about reading older works is coming across words I’ve never seen before or words with seemingly odd usages.

There are many such terms that I’ve stumbled across in this book, but one in particular was “short shrift.” This was my first encounter:

Except for the police, who were given short shrift when they were discovered hiding in garrets or firing from roofs on the crowds, the Revolution, although tumultuous, was, in the main, good-natured.

Later in the book, Chamberlin used the term again:

And a list of workers’ “excesses,” compiled by a newspaper, indicates that the engineer, like the army officer or the landlord, sometimes received short shrift from the mobs of enraged workers …

Chamberlin then goes to document cases in which factory engineers and managers were beaten, shot, or killed.

These usages were intriguing. I’ve always heard or used “short shrift ” in the sense of paying little attention or giving little credence to something; e.g., the Republicans gave President Obama’s ideas short shrift. One of the definitions Merriam-Webster provides bears that out:

little or no attention or consideration <gave the problem short shrift>

I don’t know about you, but if someone is firing a gun at me, I’m not going to pay them little attention. Nor do I think that beating or killing people lines up with that definition (though I guess an argument could be made if it was done indiscriminately).

It turns out that the above definition is actually the second definition. The first definition provided by Merriam-Webster is:

barely adequate time for confession before execution

The Online Etymology Dictionary states that “shrift” derives from the old English “scrift”:

confession to priest, followed by penance and absolution

It further adds:

Short shrift originally was the brief time for a condemned criminal to confess before execution (1590s); figurative extension to “little or no consideration” is first attested 1814.

Now those sentences make much more sense and the fate of the officers and engineers is crystal clear.