Transcript of “Why Do We Call Getting Ripped Off “Highway Robbery”?”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, Grant. It’s Damon from Longmont, Colorado.
Longmont, Colorado. Hi, Damon.
So recently I was on a little road trip up here in the mountains and I stopped to get gas.
And this older gentleman was talking to me while we were gassing up and he started talking about the gas prices.
And he said, you know, it’s highway robbery what they’re charging us up here.
And, you know, I knew what he meant.
And I’ve heard the term highway robbery used many times before.
But it got me thinking as to why we call it highway robbery.
Like, is it because when you’re traveling, the gas stations know that they kind of have a captive audience so they can charge whatever they want?
Or is there kind of a because there’s kind of a nuance to the term that means you have to pay like you don’t have a choice.
But then I wondered if it went maybe even farther back than just traveling by car to like when people would have to travel by carriage through the countryside and risk robbery out in the wilds of the woods like you’d see in an old Robin Hood movie or Western.
But what I concluded was that if anyone knows, it’s Martha and Grant.
So here I am.
You’re right.
It’s way older than gas stations.
It does indeed go back centuries.
The term highway robbery has its roots in the late 1600s.
And as you suggested, yes, this was a time when the highways in and out of London and other towns were very poorly lit.
You know, there’s no artificial light at all, and they lacked policing.
And so if you traveled outside the city at night, you were taking a tremendous risk.
And at that time, there were highway robbers who would ride up on horseback and they’d point a pistol at you and demand your money.
And I’m going to get back to that demand in a second.
But I wanted to tell you about these robbers.
They were considered a higher class of criminals than the folks in the city.
They weren’t just involved in petty thievery or coming up behind you and mugging you on the street.
These were robbers on horseback, and they were daring and confrontational, and a lot of them were flamboyant.
And in the 17th and 18th centuries, they became these objects of kind of fascination and figures of romance.
And there were ballads and plays and poems written about them.
And it had to do in part with the fact that they had something of a code of honor.
They aspired to be the gentlemen of the road or the knights of the road.
And they usually let their victims go after robbing them if they turned over their valuables.
And usually they left poorer folks alone and robbed the wealthy folk, the folk who could travel outside of the city.
You know, a corrupt innkeeper might tip off a highwayman and say, you know, this wealthy family is going to be traveling by night toward Brighton or such and such a place.
And so you can take advantage of them then.
And so this term highway robbery arose very shortly thereafter.
The first term was highway robber, then highway robbery.
And I mentioned the phrase that they used when they stopped a carriage.
And this is really cool because they would point a pistol at the occupants and say, stand and deliver.
And sometimes they would say, your money or your life.
Those phrases go back to that.
And later, by the late 1700s, there was so much associated with the term highway robbery that it came to have this more general meaning of just an outrageously high fee.
There was so much mythology around this term.
And so it came to mean blatantly overcharging.
Good to know.
Now I know next time I’m getting gas that I’m being robbed by a higher, more noble robber.
Well, I wouldn’t go that far.
I wouldn’t go that far, Damon.
But I tell you, I used the term highway robbery just this past week when I was paying for parking in downtown San Diego.
Exactly.
The words came out of my mouth and it’s kind of amazing that it goes back hundreds and hundreds of years.
That is really cool to know.
Thank you very much.
Well, thank you.
Thanks for calling.
Call us again sometime, Damon.
Have a great day.
Bye-bye.
All right.
Be well.
You are welcome to call us up and see what we can say about what you say.
