"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 22/08/17 (rifles)

We're going to talk about rifles today, but not perhaps in the sense that you might think of them, though I will mention the gun. I'm going to go back to the very early days of the word rifle, when it meant to plunder or to scratch - and the idea of scratching was maybe to search thoroughly, to just scratch the earth in order to find something. And today, if we're rifling through a book, we still have that sense of searching very thoroughly. But how that transfrred into a gun sense is quite interesting, because "to rifle" originally meant to making of grooves in the barrel of a gun, so again, that scratchung or etching, if you like, of indentations in the barrel of a gun - and rifle, of course, we have kept today. It transferred then to the gun itself. But only a person who was probably the dregs of society would plunder loot from the bodies of those who died in battle, perhaps from a rifle, and o perhaps it's appropriate that that's a historu of our phrase "riff-raff", ehich is related to these early sense of rifling, and I'll explain why. Riff-raff today, obviously desreputable people, othen used in a fairly classist sense, I guess, for the dregs of society, so not particularly nice word to use. The tale begins with that word rifle, to plunder, but also another word "rafle", spelt R-A-F-L-E, which was to snatch or to carry away. And "rifle" anf "rafle" in French reffered to plundering the battlefield dead anf making off with their loot, whether it was ammunition, whether it was amulets that some of the soldiers took with them, and the phrase eventually wandered into English as "riff and raff". And actually the first meaning was "evry single one", perhaps with that sense of looting so thoroughly, there was absolutely nothing left. Eventualy, riff and raff meant "everyone" and of course, it later came to refer to the common folk, a little bit loke "hoi polloi", if you like. Perhaps there was a whiff of those nasty battlefield thieves and that's why eventually it became the really derogatory term that we know today. But it all began with that horrible looting of dead bodies, unfortunatelly, on the battlefield.