I find myself wondering whether I’ve achieved the rare distinction of beating Google; or whether I’m imagining stuff out of nowhere and “from whole cloth”. Am sure that Dopers – learned as ever – will have information to offer on this as-follows matter.
The thing arose out of a conversation between me and my brother. I said something about, re person A beating person B in some endeavour, B “ceding the palm to” A. Brother found this expression effectively meaningless – he guessed wildly, that it might perhaps have some Palm Sunday connotation – and requested that I elucidate.
I have had the impression, for many decades back, that “to cede – or accord – the palm to someone”, was a well-established English-language figure of speech, implying the palm-recipient’s triumphing in whatever enterprise was involved; and his being duly honoured by his defeated opponents and / or the general populace. My general feeling has been that this thing was thousands of years old, from the Mediterranean / mid-Eastern cradle of civilisation, and involved ceremonial honouring by bestowal of the foliage of the date palm: with roots both in things Judaeo-Christian, and in pagan Egypt / Mesopotamia /Greece / Rome. As said, brother had all-but not heard of any of this, and was rather mystified: we agreed that the thing should be Googled.
Various Googling attempts made, involving “palm”, “ceding of to”, “according of to”. They turned up all-but nothing referring to the “honouring” issue. Quickest setting-out: Wikipedia, re the word “palm”, offered as follows (in Wiki’s order of priority). Palm of the hand; things botanical (first and foremost, the oil palm); technology (Palm Pilots, etc.); business and industry (companies named “Palm…”); place-names including “Palm” (in Australia / Dubai / USA); “other uses” (including, “way down”, a brief reference to Palm Sunday); and lastly, “See Also” – including palming (sleight-of-hand technique); palmistry ; and sago.
Views sought, please. Is there a hole here, in the Net’s (mostly) omniscience; or have I imagined a supposed millennia-old meme, which in the main didn’t exist?
If you google “ceded the palm,” you get quite a few hits, going back to 1794: “Intolerance and oppression after a faint struggle ceded the palm to liberality, reason and justice.”
from A Short History of the British Empire During the Last Twenty Months: Viz. from May 1792 to the Close of the Year 1793 by Francis Plowden.
Actually, it’s entirely possible that you won’t. One really can’t be said to “beat” a search engine that blatantly bubbles its search results, unless you’ve got the wherewithal to stop using it.
Well, I don’t know. I received “about 8,900 results” when searching for “cede the palm” in quotes on google and 14,200 for “ceded the palm”. Seems to have been a popular phrase in the 1800s and not so much today. Just use quotes when you want something exact and you will receive results.
From context across all these results I could have easily realized the meaning of the phrase even if I had never heard it before. Now, if you’re asking if there is specifically a webpage that spells out in plain letters, “to ‘cede the palm’ is another way to say ‘admit defeat’ or ‘show deference to’” well we have one now, don’t we? This page does in fact show up in both searches.
For whatever reason that number is false. If you scroll the the bottom, you’ll notice there’s only a couple pages, and if you click on the last one, you’ll notice there’s only 25 results for “cede the palm” and 21 for “ceded the palm”.
Here’s two other more or less contemporary uses of “palm” as the symbol of success.
The Palme d’Or Palme d'Or - Wikipedia is the highest award at the world renowned Cannes film festival.
The motto of my alma mater, the University of Southern California, is “Palmam qui meruit ferat”, sometimes shortened to “Qui palmam meruit.” Motto - About USC Which they say means roughly “let whoever earns the palm bear it.” That link has a pretty good potted history of other uses of the term.