Gantlet vs. Gauntlet

[skipperbob]

One of my pet peeves is the mis-use of the phrase "he ran the gantlet"...often mis-spoken as "he ran the gauntlet". A gauntlet being a medival chainmail glove, whereas a gantlet is two parallel lines of armed men used to punish/torture the victim who must run between them.

However, when chastizing a well-spoken friend of mine for this malaprop he offerred to bet me $$$$$$ that I was just being pedantic and that "running the gauntlet" , though technically incorrect, had become acceptable because of it's widespread & repeated use.

Anybody "know" the answer?

[swede123]

Dictionary.com is usually pretty solid about this kind of stuff. Here's their entry. (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=gantlet) Seems like your friend is correct in this one.

Swede

[Gunny Highway]

Word History: The spelling gauntlet is acceptable for both gauntlet meaning “glove” or “challenge” and gauntlet meaning “a form of punishment in which lines of men beat a person forced to run between them” but this has not always been the case. The story of the gauntlet used in to throw down the gauntlet is linguistically unexciting: it comes from the Old French word gantelet, a diminutive of gant, “glove.” From the time of its appearance in Middle English (in a work composed in 1449), the word has been spelled with an au as well as an a, still a possible spelling. But the gauntlet used in to run the gauntlet is an alteration of the earlier English form gantlope, which came from the Swedish word gatlopp, a compound of gata, “lane,” and lopp, “course.” The earliest recorded form of the English word, found in 1646, is gantelope, showing that alteration of the Swedish word had already occurred. The English word was then influenced by the spelling of the word gauntlet, “glove,” and in 1676 we find the first recorded instance of the spelling gauntlet for this word, although gantelope is found as late as 1836. From then on spellings with au and a are both found, but the au seems to have won out.

[Nicholasp27]

well mtv has

real world vs road rules challenge: the gauntlet

so your friend must be correct /images/graemlins/crazy.gif