Institutional Racism

1527 of Thucydides’ History of the war that was between the Peloponnesians and the
Athenians both in the countries of the Greeks and the Romans and the neighbouring
places wherein the translator writes harasser allegedly meaning harceler (to exhaust the
enemy by repeated raids); and in the military chant Chanson du franc archer of 1562,
where the term is referred to a gaunt jument (de poil fauveau, tant maigre et harassée:
of fawn horsehair, so meagre and …) where it is supposed that the verb is used
meaning overtired.
A hypothesis about the origin of the verb harasser is harace/harache, which was used in
the 14th century in expressions like courre à la harache (to pursue) and prendre aucun
par la harache (to take somebody under constraint). The Französisches Etymologisches
Wörterbuch, a German etymological dictionary of the French language (1922–2002)
compares phonetically and syntactically both harace and harache to the interjection
hare and haro by alleging a pejorative and augmentative form. The latter was an
exclamation indicating distress and emergency (recorded since 1180) but is also
reported later in 1529 in the expression crier haro sur (to arise indignation over
somebody). hare 's use is already reported in 1204 as an order to finish public activities
as fairs or markets and later (1377) still as command but referred to dogs. This
dictionary suggests a relation of haro/hare with the old lower franconian *hara (here) (as
by bringing a dog to heel).
While the pejorative of an exclamation and in particular of such an exclamation is
theoretically possible for the first word (harace) and maybe phonetically plausible for
harache, a semantic, syntactic and phonetic similarity of the verb harasser as used in
the first popular attestation (the chant mentioned above) with the word haras should be
kept in mind: Already in 1160 haras indicated a group of horses constrained together for
the purpose of reproduction and in 1280 it also indicated the enclosure facility itself,
where those horses are constrained.
The origin itself of harass is thought to be the old Scandinavian hârr with the Romanic
suffix –as, which meant grey or dimmish horsehair. Controversial is the etymological
relation to the Arabic word for horse whose roman transliteration is faras.
Although the French origin of the word 'harassment' is beyond all question in the Oxford
English Dictionary and those dictionaries basing on it, a supposed Old French verb
harer should be the origin of the French verb harasser, despite the fact that this verb
cannot be found in French etymologic dictionaries like that of the Centre national de
resources textuelles et lexicales or the Trésor de la langue française informatisé (see
also their corresponding websites as indicated in the interlinks); since the entry further
alleges a derivation from hare, like in the mentioned German etymological dictionary of
the French language a possible misprint of harer = har/ass/er = harasser is plausible or
cannot be excluded. In those dictionaries the relationship with harassment were an
interpretation of the interjection hare as to urge a dog to attack', despite the fact that it
should indicate a shout to come and not to go (hare = hara = here; cf. above). The
American Heritage Dictionary prudently indicates this origin only as possible.
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