I'm currently reading "The Prince and the Pauper" by Mark Twain and have come across the phrase "Give somebody the road". Does it mean "let someone pass by you in the street without paying any attention to him?" Below is the extract:
After a while the weather grew milder, and the clouds lifted
somewhat. The troop ceased to shiver, and their spirits began to
improve. They grew more and more cheerful, and finally began to
chaff each other and insult passengers along the highway. This
showed that they were awaking to an appreciation of life and its
joys once more. The dread in which their sort was held was
apparent in the fact that everybody gave them the road, and took
their ribald insolences meekly, without venturing to talk back.
They snatched linen from the hedges, occasionally in full view of
the owners, who made no protest, but only seemed grateful that
they did not take the hedges, too.
Best Answer
Gave them the road is not an expression that native speakers of my part of the U.S. would say, so it seems outdated. As a speaker of 20th-21st century English I would interpret it to mean something like
which means, everybody got out of their way and let them pass by or whatever.
There is idiom in Cassell's Dictionary of Slang give someone the road meaning to avoid, to ignore and another entry for the same ohrase that is an alternate version of give someone the bag. When you look at that one (p. 603), none of the definitions really fit. The date given for the first entry (avoid, ignore) is 1910s+, which is weird, since Twain published P&P about 1880.
I am not sure how well ignore or avoid fits here, since the passengers also took their ribald insolences meekly, without venturing to talk back. Maybe one of the things they did was to avoid or ignore them. This definition seems to fit, and again the phrase give someone the road is not used today in my experience. But avoid can have a meaning of yield someone the right of way.
Whatever it means, it means to try to stay out of their way. Sometimes native speakers have to guess too.