Rogue

[Dr. Goodword]

• rogue •

Pronunciation: rog • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: 1. A dishonest, unprincipled person; a scoundrel, as in rogues' gallery. 2. An individual that deserts its kind and sets out on a destructive path, as a rogue elephant. 3. A mischievous trouble-maker with an inclination for practical jokes. 4. An anomalous organism, plant or animal, displaying an undesirable trait.

Notes: The history of this word shows that it began its life rather innocently, developed into a very strong term, and today is growing milder in its usage. It comes with a large family of derivations: an adjective roguish, the nouns roguedom, referring to the class of rogues collectively, and roguery, the knavishness that characterizes rogues. Today roguery generally refers to mischief sooner than mayhem.

In Play: Rogues are generally bad people: "Sal McGundy's watch was stolen by a masked rogue in the park who greeted Sal, 'It's Rolex time!'" But then, the Devil is also bad yet a devilish smile and a roguish smile are pretty much the same, a smile suggestive of mild trickery or deceit that is more humorous than threatening. "In the boardroom, Mick Stupp is a rogue who loves to throw a monkey wrench into the discussion just to see what confusion he can cause."

Word History: The problem this word raises for etymologists is that it has too many possible origins without sufficient evidence to establish any. In the mid-sixteenth century a vagrant or mendicant pretending to be a poor Oxford or Cambridge scholar was known as a roger, pronounced [ro-gêr] so that merely dropping the [êr] would give us our pronunciation. However, it looks more like French rogue "arrogant, haughty". There is also a Celtic term rog "haughty" used at that time in Breton, the original language of Brittany. By 1859, however, the dishonesty of wandering rogues led this word to the stronger sense it has in the phrase "rogues' gallery", the photographs of criminals kept by the police. (Thank you Larry Brady for suggesting the name Sal McGundy.)

[LukeJavan8]

Another good one for Doc's list.

[George Kovac]

“Rogue” is a great sounding word and it has several related meanings from charmingly impish to downright malignant. The word is aptly deployed in the title of the classic 1938 political thriller “Rogue Male.”

Recently “rogue” was used in a positive sense to mean “independent,” as in the US elections of 2008 in which some candidates boasted that their strength of character was their ability to “go rogue.” I’m not sure this meaning will (or should) survive as one of the accepted definitions of the word.

A traditional use of the word—metaphorically or not—is in the phrase “rogue elephant,” a usage that emphasizes the destructiveness of the pachyderm or human rogue. Sometimes we instead call one of these folks a “lone wolf,” a related and equally pejorative metaphor. Rogue elephants and lone wolves are not exactly the same beasts, but the metaphors overlap. Rogue elephants are known for their widespread destructiveness to all things and creatures around them, and are always dangerous. On the other hand, a lone wolf is not necessarily dangerous to a wide audience--or dangerous at all. A metaphoric lone wolf is someone who works in isolation or is unconventional in his thinking (especially in professional, academic, scientific or ideological contexts) and is often marginalized and considered irrelevant, wrong, ignorable or otherwise out of the mainstream. But lately the lone wolf metaphor has evolved to emphasize the element of widespread danger. For example, when a dramatic act of terrorism occurs, the first task of the police is to determine if the perpetrator was part of an organized pack, or acted as a “lone wolf.”

[LukeJavan8]

And of course its most recent use: North Korea as a rogue nation.

[Perry Lassiter]

The term has also been applied to legislators like McCain and Lieberman in that they refuse at times to follow the party line, onsidering their own ideas or their constituents. Of course, if you are a hard-liner, you may consider their form of rogery very bad indeed. But if you hate both conformity and party platforms, as I do, being a rogue can be a positive thing!