The centenary of George Barker’s birth was mentioned in the Times Literary Supplement recently. His ‘first two books — one of verse, the other prose — were released in 1933’. Released? Isn’t that what happens to films and Engelbert Humperdinck?
Released suddenly seems to have replaced published. Certainly Amazon is reinforcing the trend, because if you order a book that has not yet been published, a message pops up with the date on which ‘this item will be released’. Until then it is available ‘for pre-order’ or, as we used to say ‘to order’.
I’ve even seen reference recently to Pride and Prejudice being released 200 years ago, even though it was advertised in the Morning Chronicle of 28 January 1813 as being ‘published this day’. Publish is much older than I suspected, being used by Wycliffe’s friends in the 14th century to refer to books that Eusebius and Pamphilius pupplescheden. Publish meant the whole process of preparing a book, not merely handing it out to be hawked around on a certain day. I can’t find publish referring to a specific day before the beginning of the 18th century, the era of Addison and Steele’s Spectator.
The last time that release extended its own semantic territory was as a euphemism for sacking employees, in the same way as let go. In the United States, this usage had developed as early as 1918, but I don’t think it has ever become respectable in Britain, except among those with tin ears.
Release, like lease, comes from Latin relaxare, which had already gained a multitude of meanings by the fifth century, when St Augustine of Hippo used it to mean ‘set at liberty’. But in the language of the Portuguese Inquisition, relaxar meant to ‘release’ an offender to the secular arm, as Joan of Arc was in France by the (English) ecclesiastical court that tried her. So historians now speak of heretics being relaxed to the secular arm in a way that English-speakers never did at the time when it was being done.
If the destination was the stake, I hope no one said ‘chillax’ to them on the way. Indeed, it is such a tiresome and useless neologism that I hope no one ever says it to anyone.
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