While “Benedict Arnold” remains in use in American parlance as a way of referring to a traitor, the much more noxious sounding quisling has largely fallen by the wayside. An unfortunate fate for a word that has been described by the London Times as “a gift from the gods…something at once slippery and tortuous.” Like Benedict Arnold, quisling originates from a historical figure, in this case Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling.
Quisling the man was born in 1887 in Norway. As a child, he was something of a mathematical prodigy. As an adult, he achieved the rank of major in Norway’s army. He worked frequently in Russia aiding in relief work during the famine of 1921 and protecting British interests in the fledgeling Soviet Union.
His time amongst Russians led to two amorous encounters and the first hint of his traitorous leanings. In 1922, he married a seventeen-year-old Ukrainian before replacing her the next year with his second wife a Russian woman named Maria.
He served as Norway’s minister of defense from 1931 to 1933, where he used military force to quell a strike. He then went on to form Norway’s Nasjonal Samling Party, which propounded fascist ideology and met with little popular support. In 1939, he began courting a Nazi invasion, which took place in April, 1940. He quickly declared himself head of the Norwegian government. In 1945, after facing years of popular resistance and resentment, Quisling was executed as a traitor.
Quisling, the word, was born in 1940 in England. the April 15th edition of the London Times first put it into print. A month later Time printed the word for the first time as lowercase. Much more popular than its namesake, it was used during World War II by such figures as Winston Churchill, George Orwell, and H. G. Wells. It would go one to spawn the the verb to quisle, quislingism, quislingize, and other rarely used words, which have all gone the way of old Vidkun himself.
More about Quisling:
The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/Quisling.html
http://www.word-detective.com/2008/04/24/malarkey/
http://www.bitsofnews.com/content/view/3965/42/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidkun_Quisling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quisling
