beyond the pale
- 1Of a person or their behavior: outside the limits of what is acceptable, or of accepted standards such as good judgment, morality, and ethics.
Even his allies agreed that threatening a reporter's family was beyond the pale.
After the scandal, donors who had once backed the senator considered him beyond the pale.
Note
The idiom keeps an old meaning of pale: a fence of stakes, and so a boundary or a territory under one authority, outside which life was thought uncivilized. It usually follows be or put: a remark is beyond the pale, and a scandal puts a person beyond the pale. Its opposite, within the pale, describes someone still inside the accepted bounds.
- 2Outside the extent or limits of something, generally followed by of and the thing whose bounds are meant.
Refugees in the camp found themselves beyond the pale of any legal protection.
For centuries, people who refused to conform were pushed beyond the pale of polite society.
Note
The of-phrase does the work here, naming what the boundary encloses: the pale of human society, of all human charities, of respectability. With it, the words can describe exclusion without condemning anyone, so a lone traveler beyond the pale of society is remote, not wicked. Drop the of-phrase and readers hear the idiom for the unacceptable instead.
Practice
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Origin
From beyond + the + pale (“wooden stake; fence of stakes; bounds, limits; territory within a boundary or jurisdiction”), suggesting that anything outside an authority’s jurisdiction is uncivilized. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there is insufficient evidence that the phrase originally referred to the English Pale in medieval Ireland or to the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire (1791–1917), where Jewish people were mostly made to live.