Savage
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"If the little savage were left to himself so that he retained all his imbecility, uniting the little reason possessed by a child in the cradle with the passionate violence in a man thirty years old, he'd wring his father's neck and sleep with his mother."--Rameau's Nephew (1805) by Denis Diderot "There are, indeed, many who doubt whether happiness is increased by civilization, and who talk of the free and noble savage. But the true savage is neither free nor noble ; he is the cold by night and the heat of the sun by day ; ignorant of agriculture, living by the chase, and improvident in success, hunger always stares him in the face, and often drives him to the dreadful alternative of cannibalism or death." Prehistoric Times (1865) by John Lubbock |
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The noun savage may refer to a noble savage, a person uncorrupted by the influences of civilisation or a pejorative term for a tribal person. As an adjective it means wild and not cultivated; barbaric and uncivilized; fierce and ferocious; brutal, vicious or merciless as in that woman across the street died from a savage murder.
Etymology
From Old French sauvage, salvage (“wild, savage, untamed”), from Late Latin salvaticus, alteration of Latin silvaticus (“wild"; literally, "of the woods”), from silva (“forest", "grove”).
See also
- Brutality
- Wild animal
- Fauve
- The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929) by Bronisław Malinowski
