Blackmail and bibingka6/1/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() It’s especially associated with public figures such as politicians and celebrities, who are often the target of such blackmail attempts. Most commonly, blackmail refers to the act of threatening to reveal a secret that will ruin someone’s reputation unless they pay or submit to other demands. (Nowadays, we’d probably call this kind of scheme extortion.) It wasn’t until a few hundred years later that blackmail came to be used in its current, more general sense. In the 1500s, Scottish chieftains engaged in a protection racket in which they’d force farmers in Scotland and northern England to pay for protection against plunder. Black is used in the sense of “bad” or “evil.” Mail doesn’t refer to the letters that we send through the post office but instead to another sense of the word meaning “payment” or “tax,” from the Old English māl, meaning “agreement.” In the original sense of blackmail, it was a forced agreement. ![]() The first records of blackmail come from the 1500s. ![]()
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