I found myself confused by a news report about sanctions this morning – was something being banned, or approved of?
When I went to the OED for the history of its usage I found that the verb & the noun seem to have moved in different directions
The verb began by meaning
“To ratify by solemn enactment; to invest with legal or sovereign authority; to make valid or binding; to authorize, encourage by express or implied approval” with for example, a quotation from a surgical textbook of 1807:
“The employment of bandages in these cases is sanctioned by high authorities”
So when in 1978 it was used in the sense of “To impose sanctions upon a person, to penalize” the Daily Mail complained:
“Sir Geoffrey Howe referred to Ford's being ‘sanctioned’... Nobody made a protest about this violence being done to the English language (or about normal meanings being stood on their head).”
As a noun however it was used more commonly for “The specific penalty enacted in order to enforce obedience to a law” & no less a writer than George Bernard Shaw was using it in the modern political sense in his 1919 Peace Conference Hints
“Such widely advocated and little thought-out ‘sanctions’ as the outlawry and economic boycott of a recalcitrant nation.”
Then, somewhere along the line it came to mean “An express authoritative permission, countenance or encouragement given (intentionally or otherwise) to an opinion or practice” to the extent that in the latest extension to the OED, ADDITIONS SERIES 1993 we find:
sanction, n.
Add: [6.] c. spec. In military intelligence, the permission to kill a particular individual. Also, a killing due to this.
with a 1983 quote from Peter Niesewand:
” His apartment was on the third floor, so the agents knew they would have to use another method of sanction... It was clear that Ross alone would kill that night while Lyle watched.”
Truly a quantum word
