peculiar institution
1
9.9
- noun
- /pɪˈkjuljər ˌɪnstɪˈtuːʃən/
- Offensive
:
esclavitud
- Southern prohibitionists were not going to fight alongside those who sought to end the South's "peculiar institution."
Examples
-
Many abolitionists dedicated their lives to fighting against the peculiar institution of slavery in the southern states.
-
But coming as I do from that background, I have a hard time seeing it as anything other than a rancid continuation of the South's "peculiar institution."
Blog text (17) -
To us, in South Carolina, black slavery is our peculiar institution, and a cherished way of life.
-
What should have happened was the leaders of the South putting together a plan of gradual manumission, with a definitive endpoint for the peculiar institution.
Blog text (15) -
If such a case were multiplied by twenty or thirty, student groups could present the results of their analyses to the class, learning in the process a great deal about the South's "peculiar institution" or, depending on the focus of the class, about a variety of other subjects.
Academic text (1998) -
Historically, the term peculiar institution was used to describe the system of slavery that existed in the South before the Civil War.
-
The debate over the peculiar institution deeply divided the nation and ultimately led to the outbreak of the Civil War.
Synonyms
225
4.8
A system where people are owned and forced to work without pay or rights
1
7.9
Owning other people and making them work
Surface Forms
Morphology
Although the constituents 'peculiar' (unusual or specific) and 'institution' (established practice) are individually transparent, their combination in this historical euphemism does not allow a B1 learner to infer the referent 'slavery'. The meaning is culturally and historically specific and idiomatic rather than compositionally derived, so it would be unpredictable without prior exposure.
Etymology
Peculiar institution was a polite name used by Southern leaders in the 1800s for 'slavery'. They used the softer words peculiar, meaning 'special to them', and institution, meaning 'an accepted part of society', to make slavery sound normal and important, so the phrase came to mean 'slavery'.