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The craft left its mark on the language: genuinely Masonic words and phrases, from a lodge 'warrant' and the 'landmarks' to 'cowan,' 'blackball,' 'hoodwink,' 'the third degree,' and 'laying the cornerstone,' where the stonemason's square, level...
The craft left its mark on the language: genuinely Masonic words and phrases, from a lodge 'warrant' and the 'landmarks' to 'cowan,' 'blackball,' 'hoodwink,' 'the third degree,' and 'laying the cornerstone,' where the stonemason's square, level, and plumb became moral symbols and everyday metaphors.
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So mote it be means so may it be, using mote, an Old English form of may that was already archaic by the later Middle Ages. It closes the Regius Manuscript, the oldest known Masonic document, dated to about 1390, and it still ends prayers in lodge ritual. The phrase later spread beyond Masonry into modern Wiccan and neo-pagan practice, which borrowed it in the twentieth century.
Cowan is a Scots word for a dry-stone waller who worked without proper training, and Masons adopted it for an outsider or an eavesdropper who tries to pass as one of the craft. It appears in the Schaw Statutes of 1598, the operative-stonemason rules issued in Scotland, which forbid master masons from working with cowans. The Tyler's job is partly to keep cowans out, and the word survives in Masonic ritual though it never entered general English.
It is often claimed that fair and square comes from the mason's square as a symbol of honesty. The dates do not support it. The phrase is recorded in English by the early 1600s, roughly a century before organized Freemasonry began with the first Grand Lodge in 1717. Here square simply carries its ordinary older sense of honest and straight, so the Masonic story is folk etymology.
The phrase Free and Accepted Masons preserves a real distinction. Operative lodges of working stonemasons began admitting accepted masons, gentlemen who did no building but joined for the fellowship and the moral teaching. The antiquary Elias Ashmole recorded his own admission as an accepted mason at Warrington in 1646, one of the earliest firsthand English accounts. That accepted branch grew into the speculative Freemasonry of today.
The square, level, plumb rule and compasses began as the real tools of the operative stonemason for checking right angles, horizontals, verticals and circles. As Freemasonry turned from a trade guild into a speculative moral society in the early eighteenth century, these tools were reread as symbols: the square for honesty, the level for equality, the plumb for uprightness. That double life, real tool and moral emblem, is what fed metaphors like on the level and on the square into everyday speech.
To be on the square means to be honest and fair, from the mason's square that tests a true right angle, long a symbol of morality in the craft. Masons also use on the square to mean within the lodge or between brothers. The metaphor of the square for uprightness is genuinely central to Freemasonry, though the general idea of square meaning honest is old enough that the phrase may not be purely Masonic in origin.
Masons use jurisdiction for the territory and authority of a Grand Lodge, and the doctrine of exclusive jurisdiction, one recognized Grand Lodge per territory, became central to how the craft governs itself. The word itself is ordinary legal Latin (jus dicere, to speak the law) and long predates Freemasonry. This is a case of Masonry adopting a legal term wholesale, not inventing one.
Masons speak of the ancient landmarks, the unwritten and supposedly unchangeable rules of the craft that no Grand Lodge may alter. The phrase appears in Anderson's Constitutions of 1723 and became a fixture of Masonic law. The ordinary word landmark, a boundary marker, is far older and biblical in feeling, so Masonry gave an existing word a specialized meaning rather than coining it.
In Freemasonry a warrant is the founding charter granted by a Grand Lodge that authorizes a group of men to meet and work as a regular lodge; a lodge holding one is said to be warranted. The system took shape after the first Grand Lodge formed in London in 1717 and was formalized in Anderson's Constitutions of 1723. The wider legal senses of warrant (a writ, an authorization) are older and come from Old French warant, so the Masonic use is a specialized borrowing rather than the source of the everyday word.
Ashlar is a masonry term for a squared block of building stone. Freemasonry made the rough ashlar and the perfect ashlar into a symbol of self-improvement: the initiate is the rough stone shaped by education and discipline into the finished block. The imagery appears on eighteenth-century tracing boards. The word stayed largely technical in ordinary English, but the rough-to-polished idea echoes phrases like a rough diamond.
In lodge ritual a candidate is brought to light when the hoodwink is removed and he first sees the lodge, a scene built around the symbolism of light as knowledge. The everyday phrase to bring something to light, meaning to reveal it, is broader and older than Masonry. Masonic ceremony gave the phrase a vivid literal staging, but it did not originate the expression.
In Masonry the hoodwink is the blindfold placed on a candidate so that light can be dramatically restored to him during initiation. The word is older than organized Freemasonry: hoodwink meant to blindfold, and then to deceive, in English from the sixteenth century, and Shakespeare uses it. Masonry kept the literal blindfold sense as a noun for the ritual cloth, so this is a shared word rather than a Masonic coinage.
A lewis is an iron cramp that grips a dressed stone so a crane can lift it, a tool used since Roman times. Masonry borrowed the word figuratively: a lewis is the son of a Mason, the strength that supports his ageing father, and the emblem appears on tracing boards described in early exposures such as Prichard's Masonry Dissected of 1730. Both senses, the hardware and the mason's son, still coexist.
The Tyler (also spelled Tiler) is the officer who guards the door of a lodge from the outside, keeping off cowans and eavesdroppers, traditionally with a drawn sword. The title is recorded in English lodge records in the early eighteenth century and is usually explained as the man who closes in the building, by analogy with a roof tiler. It stayed inside Masonic use and did not become an everyday word.
On the level plays on the mason's level, the tool that proves a surface is truly horizontal, and inside the lodge it stands for the equality of all brothers regardless of rank. In wider English it came to mean honest, fair and straight-dealing. The Masonic use of the level as a symbol of equality is well documented, and it is a plausible channel for the everyday phrase, though the honest sense may also draw on the plain builder's image.
In Masonic speech a profane is simply a person who has not been initiated, said without insult. The word comes from Latin profanus, literally before or outside the temple (pro fanum), the ground where the uninitiated stood. Masonry kept that old sense of outside the sacred enclosure while everyday English drifted toward profane meaning irreverent or obscene.
A due-guard is a hand sign given in the lodge that recalls the position a candidate took while making his obligation. The term is especially common in American Masonic ritual from the later eighteenth century onward. Its origin is uncertain; it is often traced to a French phrase meaning gesture of guard or duly guard, but that is an explanation rather than a settled etymology, and the word remains confined to Masonic use.
To blackball someone is to vote to exclude them, from the practice of secret ballots dropped as white balls for yes and black balls or cubes for no. Masonic lodges use this ballot to admit members, and a single black ball can reject a candidate. Gentlemen's clubs of the same period used the same method, so the word is shared club-and-lodge vocabulary rather than exclusively Masonic, but the lodge ballot is one of its clearest and best-preserved homes.
A cornerstone is the first stone set at a building's foundation, and the phrase is biblical and older than Freemasonry. What Masonry added was the public ceremony of laying it with corn, wine and oil and a Grand Lodge officer testing it with square and level. George Washington, in Masonic apron, laid the cornerstone of the United States Capitol in a Masonic rite in 1793, fixing the image of the ritual cornerstone in the public mind.
A popular story says OK is Masonic, tracing it to a lodge phrase or a secret sign. Scholarship has settled the real origin: OK first appears in the Boston Morning Post on 23 March 1839 as a jokey abbreviation of oll korrect, a deliberate misspelling of all correct that was part of a craze for comic initialisms. The Masonic claim, like the many other pet theories, is unsupported.
On the up and up means honest and above-board, and it occasionally gets linked to Masonic ideas of uprightness and the plumb rule. The expression is recorded in North American English from the mid-nineteenth century, and dictionaries treat its exact origin as uncertain. There is no documentary evidence tying it to Freemasonry, so the Masonic connection is speculation rather than established fact.
A square deal means a fair, honest arrangement, and it is sometimes credited to the Masonic square as a symbol of honesty. More likely it simply extends the ordinary sense of square as fair, the same sense behind fair and square, and it may draw on square dealing at cards. The phrase spread in American English in the later nineteenth century and was made famous by Theodore Roosevelt. The Masonic attribution is unproven.
To give someone the third degree means to question them harshly. The popular explanation ties it to Freemasonry's third and highest degree, that of Master Mason, whose ceremony of raising is the most demanding a candidate faces; the three-degree system was in place by about 1730. The interrogation sense is recorded in American English around 1900. The link is widely believed and plausible, though some lexicographers note it could also just play on degree meaning a step or level of severity.
The whole nine yards, meaning the entire amount, has one of the most argued origins in American English, with theories ranging from ammunition belts to concrete trucks to cloth for a suit; a Masonic explanation circulates among these. The earliest known print uses are American from the early twentieth century, and no source, Masonic or otherwise, has been proven. It belongs firmly in the disputed column.
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