Tilting at windmills and other adages

"Beyond the pale" refers to conduct outside the bounds of acceptable behavior. "The Pale" was the part of Russia to which Jews were confined, at least those who were not killed in a pogrom.

BEYOND THE PALE (via a Google search)

Pail vs. pale:

That’s a common misspelling these days because the word that really belongs in the expression has gone out of use except in this one case. The expression is properly beyond the pale. That word pale has nothing to do with the adjective for something light in colour except that both come from Latin roots. The one referring to colour is from the Latin verb pallere, to be pale, whilst our one is from palus, a stake.

A pale is an old name for a pointed stake driven into the ground to form part of a fence and—by obvious extension—to a barrier made of such stakes, a fence (our modern word paling is from the same source, as are pole and impale). This meaning has been around in English since the fourteenth century. By 1400 it had taken on various figurative senses, such as a defence, a safeguard, a barrier, an enclosure, or a limit beyond which it was not permissible to go.

In particular, it was used to describe various defended enclosures of territory inside other countries. For example, the English pale in France in the fourteenth century was the territory of Calais, the last English possession in that country. The best-known modern example is the Russian Pale, between 1791 up to the Revolution in 1917, which were specified provinces and districts within which Russian Jews were required to live. Another famous one is the Pale in Ireland, that part of the country over which England had direct jurisdiction—it varied from time to time, but was an area of several counties centred on Dublin. The first mention of the Irish Pale is in a document of 1446–7. Though there was an attempt later in the century to enclose the Pale by a bank and ditch (which was never completed), there never was a literal fence around it.

The expression beyond the pale, meaning outside the bounds of acceptable behaviour, came much later. The idea behind it was that civilisation stopped at the boundary of the pale and beyond lay those who were not under civilised control and whose behaviour therefore was not that of gentlemen. A classic example appears in The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, dated 1837: “I look upon you, sir, as a man who has placed himself beyond the pale of society, by his most audacious, disgraceful, and abominable public conduct”. The earliest example I’ve found is from Sir Walter Scott in 1819.

It may be older than this, but it surely doesn’t date back to the period of the Irish Pale, or anywhere near. It is often said that it does come directly from that political enclosure, but the three-century gap renders that very doubtful indeed. The idea behind it is definitely the same, though.