Next week sees the return of Black Friday – a cunning attempt to kick-start the seasonal shopping madness. Luckily, those of us who are retail-resistant have plenty of terms we can use to express our distaste for what goes on.“It’s mayhem out there,” we might say, without knowing that we were using a technical term from criminal law. “Mayhem” is the infliction of physical injury on a person, thereby impairing their capacity to fight back. It is first recorded in the Rolls of Parliament from 1447, during the reign of Henry VI. It was originally a variant of “maim”, which was then a noun meaning a serious wound. Both words came from Old French.“Mayhem” was taken across to United States law, and began to be used more widely there to