Mole

Learners of English must continually be frustrated by words in our language which have multiple, completely disparate meanings.  Take “mole,” for which the OED lists at least ten distinct senses.  The most prominent of these are: a raised ugly lesion, either benign or of the sort you hope your doctor doesn’t find on your skin and frown at; a massive stone breakwater (from Latin moles, “rock,” “boulder”); an exact unit of measurement in chemistry (from “molecule”); and a small burrowing mammal, usually with a soft black furry coat, often blind.   Let us concentrate on the small animal.

It is its burrowing, subterranean, perhaps surreptitious aspect which Hamlet seems to have on his mind, when after seeing the ghost of his murdered father, he hears the ghost’s call for a pledge of secrecy (“Swear!”), and responds “Well said, old mole!  Canst work i’ the earth so fast?” (1.5.162).  He then praises the ghost for being a worthy “pioneer,” that is, a soldier specializing in laying mines and digging tunnels under an enemy’s fortifications.

In digging their burrows, moles throw up dirt into molehills, mounds of earth, hence the evocative English term “mole-country” for “graveyard.”  Hence also an obsolete name for the European mole, “mouldwarp,” which means “earth-thrower” and closely resembles the modern German Maulwurf.   Figuratively, hyperbolic types may mistake molehills for, or exaggerate them into, mountains.  “To make a mountain out of a molehill” is exactly matched by the French phrase faire une montagne d’une taupinière but not by the German phrase for the same phenomenon, which is aus einer Mücke einen Elephanten machen, “make an elephant out of a mosquito.”

Yet another meaning of mole-the-animal, figurative and very contemporary, may be found in literary work which even more than Hamlet concerns itself with spying and surveillance.  This is the fiction of John Le Carré.  There, a “mole” is a penetration agent, someone recruited by an enemy power (in Le Carré, usually the Soviet Union) to burrow deeply into the British establishment, especially into the country’s secret service.  The mole may lie dormant for years until the moment comes to betray his country’s trust, work his mischief, and undermine defenses.  There is one such mole in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, whose identity I will withhold in case you have not read the novel.  He is—or at least threatens to be—a disastrously effective pioneer.  “Mole” is now a term used in the real world, and interestingly, the OED suggests that it entered that world from Le Carré’s fictions, rather than the other way round.

Spycraft moles may or may not have intervened meaningfully in British history.  Certainly the burrowing animal did.  On a day in 1702 the fifty-two-year-old King William III of England went out riding; his horse caught its foot in a mole’s burrow, stumbled, and threw William; William broke his collarbone and as a complication developed pneumonia; and from pneumonia he died.  Jacobite exiles in France, followers of the Catholic Stuart line, rejoiced at the death of the staunchly Protestant William.  And that is why when they raised their glasses, something which by all accounts they did as frequently as possible, they toasted “the little gentleman in the black velvet waistcoat.”