Meaning:
Close interrogation.
Background:
The classification of the qualities of objects by degree - heat and cold,
moisture and dryness etc. - was commonplace in the middle ages. Henry Lyte's
translation of Dodoens' Niewe herball or historie of plantes, 1578 includes a
description of rue:
"Rue is hoate and dry in the thirde degree."
Shakespeare went on to apply the degree classification to drink, in Twelfth
Night, 1602:
"For he s in the third degree of drinke: hee's drown'd: go looke after him."
The present meaning involves more than classification though. `The third
degree' is well-known to all US crime-fiction enthusiasts as `an intensive,
possibly brutal, interrogation'.
In Masonic lodges there are three degrees of membership; the first is called
Entered Apprentice, the second Fellowcraft, and the third is master mason.
When a candidate receives the third degree in a Masonic lodge, he is
subjected to some activities that involve an interrogation and it is more
physically challenging than the first two degrees. It is this interrogation
that was the source of the name of the US police force's interrogation
technique. That is referred to in an 1900 edition of Everybody's Magazine:
"From time to time a prisoner... claims to have had the Third Degree
administered to him."
- www.phrases.org.uk [edited]
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I had a brush with the third degree defending my thesis in grad school when a
faculty member, a well-known professor from a rival city, questioned a key
theorem I set out to prove. It was his area and he was on the ball with the
holes in my argument. I could have been sent back for another term to make
everything bullet-proof had not one of my advisors weighed in and saved the day.
Of course, afterwards, I felt like a fake but Mike, my other advisor, assured me
that it was how research was done--there was always going to be future work--and
I was ready.
