November
2005 Archives
Toponyms: toponym; New York minute; Bronx cheer (Goldilocks economy);
shanghai; serendipity (buckyball, fullerene, buckytube; buckminsterfullerene);
wailing wall; denim (jeans, levis, serge; twill, Genoa); sherry
Toponyms from heavenly places: cockaigne; Elysium; tempean; Eden;
tranquillityite; Shangri-La; ***
Thanksgiving: non nobis; beatitude; minerval; benison; gramercy;
hosanna/hosannah
Toponyms
In geography, a toponym is the name
of a place (England), especially one describing landscape (Pacific
Ocean). In the linguistic sense - not yet in OED - a toponym is a word derived
from a place name. This week we present linguistic toponyms.
New York minute (used only in the phrase in a New York minute) –
immediately; at once; in a heartbeat
On this toponym the authorities need a bit of correction. They include no
recorded usage before 1967 (see World Wide
Words; OED is similar), but we can take this back almost a century further,
to the 1870 quotation below.
Also, the usually-given definition given is not quite correct. OED says,
"New York minute: a very short period of time; a moment, an instant";
AHD is
similar. Not so: you wouldn't say, "I can only stay for a New York
minute;" for an instant; briefly. The term is not used with
"for". It appears only in the phrase "in a New York minute;"
in a very short time; in an instant; immediately. For the importance of this
distinction, see our final and quotation. It is a bit blue, but Mr. Holmes is
saying that he would undertake an activity immediately, but not briefly. 
A Wildcat Story, The Indiana Democrat (Indiana County, PA), Sept. 8, 1870:
He
was preparing to settle into an all night's sleep, when a scratching sound was
heard beneath the bed. Hastily rising, he jerked on his unmentionables, and, dropping
on all fours, began to crawl beneath the bed after the midnight intruder.
He found it, and in one-fourth of a New
York minute all the clothes that were upon him would not have made a
bib for a China doll. He finally found himself in the corner partially scalped,
with his lower limbs looking as though he had been through a wool-carding
machine; while at this juncture, with a spit and a growl, a catamount
disappeared through the open window.
[Patrick] Holmes leaned in and asked, "Let's get business out of the way.
Why did you suggest we have dinner tonight?" Stealey gave him a coy smile.
"Do I have to have a reason to want to have dinner with a handsome,
fabulously wealthy, powerful man?" Holmes's response was a mix of primal
grunt and laughter. "Oh, Peggy, you know I'd screw your brains out in a New
York minute, but we both also know you're a dick tease. So …
let's just keep our attention above the table."
– Vince Flynn, Memorial Day
While we're in New York City, here's another
New York toponym.
Bronx cheer -- a loud sound, imitating a fart, used to express
contemptuous or derisive scorn. It is produced by vibrating the lips while
exhaling explosively. (can be used figuratively)
Another term for this is raspberry (Cockney rhyming slang: raspberry
from raspberry tart = fart). Many dictionaries are too coy to
come out and say that a Bronx cheer sounds like a fart. They instead refer you
to "raspberry", where the flatulent reference is buried amid more
fruitful definitions.
Ben Bernanke,
President Bush's choice as the next Federal Reserve chairman, faces a delicate
balancing act to preserve the Goldilocks character of today's just-right
economy. The stock markets … embrace[d] Bernanke's selection. The Dow
rocketed … But bond prices, perhaps because of uncertainty over just how
vigilant Bernanke would be about fighting inflation, slipped lower.
"Bernanke got three cheers from the stock market and got a Bronx
cheer from the bond market," said Brian Wesbury …
– George Avalos, Contra Costa (CA) Times, Oct. 25, 2005
Bonus Word: (all credit on this to the Word Spy site)
Goldilocks economy – an economy that is not so overheated that it causes
inflation, and not so cool that it causes a recession
America's
"not too hot, not too cold" Goldilocks economy is getting
too hot. The result will be 8% interest rates by next summer if the overheated,
tech-craze-driven stock market does not crash first.
– John Makin, Sunday Times (London), December 12, 1999
This rate of expansion is considered by many to be the maximum that the nation
can sustain without inflation. … Stephen S. Roach … thinks they can be balanced
for a while … But the consensus view of most economists is that a Goldilocks
economy cannot survive beyond 1990.
– Louis Uchitelle, The New York Times, November 13, 1988 (earliest citation)
Today, our toponyms leave New York with a
quote about a much sadder departure from that city. Our word is current, but
our quote antedates OED's earliest by more than a decade. It tells a chilling,
true tale, and it evokes the time, before the Panama Canal, when China was a
terribly far voyage from New York City.
The New York
Times, Feb. 9, 1860, p.3: Richard A. Eddy, a negro, was then placed on trial,
charged with the murder of James Boston on the 28th of June, 1859. These are
the facts of the case: The ship Ellen Austen, Capt. Garrick, had just arrived
in this port, after an 18 months' voyage, when Eddy, one of her crew, an hour
after getting into dock, was enconntered at the corner of Peck-slip and Front
street, by the man Boston. Eddy well-remembered him as being the individual who
kidnapped, or, as it is called, "shanghaied" him on
board the Ellen Austin, before she sailed on the voyage which was just
terminated. Boston, who was one of the most notorious "shanghais,"
or kidnappers of colored men, and quite adept in forcing them on board vessels
just ready to go to sea, against their will, again approached Eddy, seized him
by the collar, and expressed his resolution to "Shanghai"
him immediately for a new voyage in another ship. Not yet being one hour on
land, and with the clear recollection of the former enforced voyage, for which
he was indebted to this same Boston, he forcibly attempted to regain his
liberty, but Boston continuing to hold and drag him along, he plunged the blade
of a claspknife into Boston's abdomen. The latter fell to the ground,
exclaiming, "I am stabbed" – was taken to the Hospital, where he died
immediately after admission. Eddy made no attempt to escape, but gave himself
up to Officer Delaney, of the Fourth Ward.
The jury convicted him of
manslaughter in the third degree. Great sympathy was manifested for him in
Court, and his sentence, undoubtedly, will be as lenient as the law allows.
shanghai – to
forcibly carry off, into servitude, a convenient victim. Figuratively:
to entrap or commandeer someone into a job: "When the planning group
met, they shanghaied the absent member into chairing the new committee.
[Note: To me, to shanghai is to say, "I need a volunteer – and that
means you!" That is, 1.a person , 2. chosen just because he is available,
3. is coerced 4. into doing work. Some broader meanings, which
you'll find in usage and dictionaries, are in my judgment not firmly enough
established to be "correct". Specifically they are: appropriating a thing¹;
or coercing a particular person²; or coercing him to something other
than labor³; or using trickery to induce [not coerce] a voluntary act.*]
Footnotes:
¹the [ad] campaign
shanghaied most of the Garden State's radio spectrum
²Quinlin … is shanghaied by his estranged wife and [his boss]
³Quinlin … is shanghaied ... and packed off to "whisky
school," the detox ward.[also OED: "to constrain or
compel"; also AHD below]
*AHD: We were shanghaied into buying worthless securities.
Sources of quotes: ¹David Plotz, Slate Magazine, June 2, 2000 ²Marilyn
Stasio, New York Times, April 4, 1999; ³Stasio
This will be the longest word-of-the day to
date.
Today's word is a 1754 coinage, but the OED definition does not match that of
the coiner. This would be understandable if the meaning had changed in
intervening usage, but in fact there was no such changed usage; indeed was no
usage whatsoever until 1880, and very very little for another 78 years. OED had
simply misdefined the word. Nonetheless, by virtue of OED's authority the
misdefinition has become the accepted definition, and the word is so used
today.
The details are an interesting story but are longer than some may wish. If you're content with just the short
version, just skip brown type.
The tale begins when Michele Tramezzino, a
printer in 1555 Venice, published a book that become quite popular. It claims
to be an old Persian tale, translated into Italian, of three princes of Ceylon.
(Some think there was no such Persian tale, Tramezzino setting his story in
Ceylon as a marketing ploy.¹) In any event The tale was popular enough on the
continent to be reprinted in Italian and translated into German and French, all
within fifty years (1884, 1883 and 1610 respectively).
But it did not much catch on in England. There was no English translation until
1722 (from a 1719 French version), and none direct-from-the-Italian until – get
this – 1965, a full four centuries after Tramezzino. Thus presumably few
Englishmen knew the tale.
One who did know was Horace Walpole, who mentioned the tale in a 1754 letter.
(He'd probably read the book as a boy – he was 5 when the English version
appeared – for recall his is imperfect: a camel in the tale becomes a mule in
his recall.) Walpole comments that he uses the word ceylonity to
describe an event like those befalling the tale's three princes, and he
explains his word by an example from the tale itself another from then-current
events.
Not a single other soul used this word, either then or after Walpole's
correspondence was published in 1833. The word did not "catch on",
presumably because few Englishmen knew the tale. It finally resurfaced in 1875,
as Walpole scholars were discussing the old Walpole letter itself, and a letter
to an erudite Oxford journal asked, "Where in his admirable letters does
Walpole refer to the story of the Princess [sic] of Ceylon?" So too an
1879 letter commented, "Ceylonity – A word coined by Horace Walpole … The
word has been quoted in some recent monthly," and raised questions about
it.
Journal editor Edward Solly replied
to each inquiry and then, in 1880, used the word himself. His usage noted
Walpole but, for the first time, was not using the "ceylonity" solely
as a reference to Walpole's usage. Perhaps this is why OED credits this by
Solly as the first usage since Walpole, 126 years earlier. For 75 more years
the word remained very rare (with only 135 print-examples through 1958), but
thereafter it spread like wildfire.
However, OED's definition does not match Walpole's (which, for that matter,
does not well match the tale itself). In view of the long lack of usage, OED
cannot plead that usage had changed. Nonetheless, the OED meaning has become
the one now used. Let's explore the differences.
· In
the Italian tale the traveling three princes are much like Sherlock
Holmes: extraordinarily skilled in observation and deduction. When asked if
they have seen a stolen camel, they ask whether it is lame, blind in the right
eye, missing a tooth, carrying honey and butter (the latter on its left side
and the former on the right) and ridden by a woman – who is pregnant! They know
so much about the crime that it's thought that they themselves must be the
criminals. But like Holmes, they explain how they deduced these details from
what they have seen along the road.
· In
Walpole's recall, Walpole says, "As their highnesses traveled, they
were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things which they were
not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the
right eye had traveled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only
on the left side, where it was worse than on the right - now do you understand
ceylonity?" Walpole is thus emphasizing the wise learning of things not
sought (he refers to "this accidental sagacity"), but omits
the "Sherlock Holmes" aspect.
· OED's
definition, below, differs from Walpole's in two ways. It omits 'sagacity'
and substitutes dumb luck; and requires that the accidental discovery be a
happy and welcome one. But OED's definition has prevailed.
I told a white lie in saying that the word is ceylonity. Had I told you
the true word, it would color your reading of the the history. The actually
word appears in the next post.
Credit: almost all the above is from these three articles by Richard Boyle, which provide
further detail. A book-length discussion was published last year, authored by
Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber.
Footnote: ¹As I understand it, the intelligentsia as a parlor game would
pose to each other trivia questions from popular books, particularly ones set
in the exotic mysterious East – much as today's Harry Potter fans enjoy talking
Potter trivia with each other. Many books were published to provide fodder for
that game, and Ceylon itself was at least somewhat in the news at the time. Did
Tramezzino make up his supposedly-Persian tale or its eastern setting? One
wonders if any such tale been found in the Persian, but I can find no scholarly
comment on that question.
serendipity – the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by
accident. Also, the fact or an instance of such a discovery.
[coined by Horace Walpole, who notes and explains it in an 1754 letter (but
with a different meaning). Walpole was referring to a tale titled The Three
Princes of Serendip. 'Serendip' is one of the old names for what we now
call Ceylon or Sri Lanka.]
The word serendipity
often pops up when scientists talk about buckyballs. In fact, chance has proven
almost as important as planning in many recent experiments involving these
soccerball-shaped, 60-carbon molecules of the fullerene family. Douglas A. Loy
says he and his co-workers were inspired to make the first buckyball polymer
only after Loy happened to catch a remark made at a conference. Now a different
group [with Chemist Roger A. Assink] reports another lucky bucky discovery.
[omitting technical matter, to the conclusion of article] Both Assink and Loy
assert that the buckyball bonanza is still going strong. "In the fullerene
business, it's pretty much open season," Loy says. Moreover, "a lot
of the serendipitous stuff that's been falling out may surprise
the devil out of you."
– Michael Stroh, Serendipity yields buckyball trap for gases, Science
News, May 30, 1992
Bonus words:
buckyball – a short name for the first-known
fullerene; it is ball-shaped
fullerene – a class of molecules with carbon atoms arranged as in a
soccer ball: pentagons and hexagons (each with carbon atoms at all points) are
arranged to form a sphere or other hollow shape. (A buckytube is any
fullerene shaped like a tube or cylinder.)
The formal name for buckyball is buckminsterfullerene, named for R.
Buckminster Fuller because its structure resembles Fuller's geodesic domes.
wailing wall – a place to vent one's woes or (less often) to seek relief
from them
Continuing west from Ceylon we reach the Old City of Jerusalem. Here, at a
remnant of Solomon's temple, Orthodox Jews come to pray, to lament, and to
place between the stones slips of paper bearing prayer requests. It's called
the Wailing Wall (many prefer the older name Western Wall,) and you can view the its website with live webcam.
A few dictionaries also recognize a broader usage of wailing wall. OED
says "also transf. and fig." without further detail,
and MW says "a source of comfort and consolation in misfortune". To
me the usage seems slightly different, so I've composed the defininiton above.
Here are multiple usage-examples (the last two from MW's Dictionary of
Allusions), from which you can judge for yourself.
Johnson's office
became a wailing wall where everybody came to cry about the
injustice of it all.
– Bryan Burrough, Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco
I do not advocate that we turn television into a twenty-seven-inch wailing
wall, where longhairs constantly moan about the state of our
culture and our defense.
– address by Edward R. Murrow, October 12, 1958 (from secondary source)
"You sound like an old fud."
"Knowing you has made me an old fud."
"Yeah, yeah, the wailing wall is around back."
– MaryJanice Davidson, Undead and Unemployed
this window in Hammersmith, West London, is … a shopfront for the booming black
market for migrant workers. In Warsaw the shop is celebrated as the "wailing
wall" – the first port of call for hundreds of Polish migrants
arriving … in search of work and a life of riches. … thousands of migrants have
simply headed for the Wailing Wall in search of an escape from
poverty. Hundreds of adverts, all written in Polish, offered an array of jobs.
– Anthony France, Migrants flock to 'wailing wall', Sunday Mirror, Apr.
4, 2004
She [Dear Abby] explained that she had never written professionally, but she
knew she could write an advice column because all her life she had been an amateur
"wailing wall without portfolio."
– Deseret News (UPI), January 12, 1996
Today people nationwide will take such problems to the … rally in Washington –
the city that has become the Wailing Wall for all of America's
woes.
– Lewis W. Diuguid, Kansas City Star, June 1, 1996
When you wear your levis, your denim
jeans, you're wearing three toponyms and an eponym or two. Those words are
too well-known to need definition, but to help explain why they are toponyms,
we present two less familiar words.
serge – a woolen twill
twill – a fabric woven to have a surface of parallel diagonal ridges
[from the same root as two and twice]
We've already seen that fustian
(toponym #1) is a type of cloth thought to be named for El Fustat, Egypt, where
it was made. Genoa, Italy produced a twilled cotton fustian, called geanes
fustian, after the city (#2), and Nîmes, France produced a woolen twill
(that is, a serge) that was similarly called serge de Nîmes (serge of
Nîmes), our third toponym.
Over time, geanes fustian shortened to geanes, geane, gene, or jene
and finally became jean (UK) or jeans (US). The
name of the Nîmes cloth shifted to a cotton fabric, rather than a serge, and de
Nîmes was shortened to denim.
Those are our toponyms, but what of our eponyms? Levis take their
name from manufacturer Levi Strauss, who sold to the miners of the 1849
California Gold rush. His selling point was an innovation that made his pants
far more durable: he reinforced the stress points with rivets. A possible
second eponym is Genoa. The name is of unclear origin but
may trace to the god Janus, who also gave us the name January.
For further information on the history of the words denim and jeans,
see the Levi Straus & Co. site.
sherry – a certain
type of wine (named from the place where it was originally produced)
Today's toponym may also be an eponym.
The ancient Romans named many a colony after Caesar, and among them is one in
the Andalusia region of Spain. Sources differ on the details: I cannot tell you
which Caesar; it's unclear whether their name was Urbs Caesaris or Asido
Caesariana; and the exactly location is sometimes identified with one
modern town, sometimes with another 35 kilometers miles away.
In any event, by the 1500s the name had evolved to Xeres (now rendered as
Jerez), and a wine produced nearby was quite naturally called vino de Xeres.
In the Spanish of the time, the X was pronounced sh. By 1540 English was
using this name for the wine, spelling it sherris or sherries to
match the Spanish pronunciation. (You'll find the former in Shakespeare's 2
Hen. IV).
Sherris/sherries is a singular noun, but it sounds like a plural. By
1604 the form sherry was being used as a singular, on the mistaken
assumption that sherris was a plural.
Toponyms
from heavenly places
Let's continue with toponyms, specializing
with those from heavenly places.
cockaigne – in peasant legand of middle ages: an imaginary
country of abundent food and of idle luxury. fig: a place of overflowing
abundance. [apparently from older words for cook and cake]
[The figurative sense is rare and not in the dictionaries, but see our quote.]
Cockaigne is the utopia of the poor and the hungry, "the medieval
peasant's dream … where cooked birds fly into one's mouth and the streams flow
with wine", ... "where the streets are said to be pav’d with
half-peck Loaves, the Houses til’d with Pancakes, and where the Fowls fly about
ready roasted, crying, Come eat me!" (Edward James, Cambridge
Companion to Science Fiction; Benjamin Franklin, Information to Those
Who Would Remove to America).
It's believed that the song Big Rock Candy Mountain traces to this legend, and
to an old song about the similar place called Lubberland.
… around the time
I was learning to walk, New York was a city of bookstores. … Downtown was the
Land of Cockaigne: used, secondhand, antique-call them
what you like, they were bookstores where you might, indeed, find anything.
– Rosemary Edghill, Bell, Book, and Murder
Elysium – a
paradise; a place or condition of ideal happiness (adj. elysian)
[Also Elysian Fields, which in Greek mythology was the abode of the
blessed after death]
But if I sound
anti-American, I am not. I am merely being realistic about the
institutionalized problems that make the US less of an Elysium
for long-term British visitors and for immigrants clamouring to come here than
many at first believe.
- Andrew Stephen, New Statesman, Nov. 17, 2003
In a fine example of copying, the AHD and MW
Coll. each have "the abode of the blessed after death", word-for-word
identically.
tempean – (of a
place) of great and delightful natural beauty
[After Tempe, a charming valley in Thessaly, in Greece]
OED's only cite is "1864 in WEBSTER; hence in mod. Dicts." That is,
OED shows no usage of the word outside of dictionaries. (It does give cites for
Tempe as "a beautiful valley [or] any delightful rural spot".)
But here is one, predating Webster by a couple of decades.
Into the
dayspring, when some rarest view
Unveileth its Tempean grace anew
To meet the sun …
– Charles Harpur (1813-1868), Regret (1842)(some editions say Tempèan)
Eden – a paradise of
innocence and unspoiled, idyllic peace (adj. edenic)
Shakespeare gives a stunning usage-example: "this scepter'd isle, this
earth of majesty, / This other Eden, demi-paradise, / This precious stone
set in the silver sea, / This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this
England." Here are a couple more, though pale by comparison.
[The] artist['s]
work, which comprised a series of lush images of two beautiful women in an Edenic
landscape, became a word-of-mouth hit - despite being written off as
chillout-room nonsense by some critics.
– Charlotte Higgins, Guardian Unlimited, Nov 16, 2005
[Ogden Nash, on a couple who graduated from an apartment flat to
home-ownership:]
The Murrays are vague about fuses, / And mechanical matters like that,
And each of them frequently muses / On the days when they lived in a flat.
Was the plumbing reluctant to plumb? / Was the climate suggestive of Canada?
Did the radio crackle and hum? / You simply called down to the janada!
The Murrays have found no replacement
For the genius who lived in the basement.
They longed for a hearth and a doorway,
In Arden, or maybe in Eden,
But the Eden is rather like Norway,
And the Arden like winter in Sweden.
Oh, I don't regret / Being wed to you,
But I wish I could wed / A janitor too.
[All quotes modified for brevity and further, where deletions require, for
clarity.]
You'll probably never have a chance to use today's toponym, but the name is out of this world. Literally. Insofar as I know, it is the only toponym named for a real (non-fictional) place which is not on earth.¹
tranquillityite – a certain mineral, a silicate of ferrous iron,
titanium, zirconium, and yttrium. Named for Mare Tranquillitatis, the Sea of
Tranquillity, on the moon.
The first astronauts on the moon landed in the Sea of Tranquillity, and they
collected rock samples to bring back to earth. Analysis revealed that the rocks
contained, in addition to familiar matter, three minerals not known on earth.
One of these was named armalcolite, for astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins.
Another was named for the Sea of Tranquillity. It was at first called
tranquilite but soon became known as tranquillityite. It may prove important to
lunar colonization, for "Of all lunar minerals, tranquillityite
is perhaps the most important carrier of the naturally radiogenic elements,
uranium and thorium." (P. H. Cadogan, Moon; credit OED)
Bonus Word: The third new mineral, an iron-based mineral of the proxene
class, was named pyroxferroite. The name proxene, coined in 1796,
means fire-stranger (pyro- πυρο- fire + xenos
ξένος stranger), as these rocks were thought to be
formed without volcanic processes, without fire. The name seems especially apt
for the lunar pyroxferroite, which is a stranger to earth.
Footnote: ¹A reader
notes that several chemical elements have names which are at root the name of a
planet or asteroid. But the heavenly body is in turn named for a character of
myth, and it is not clear to me whether thte character, or the body, gave its
name to the element.
Shangri-La – 1. an
imagined paradise on earth 2. a distant hideaway, secluded, peaceful and
beautiful
[From the utopia in the novel Lost Horizon be James Hilton (1933), and
its 1937 movie. La is Tibetan for 'mountain pass', and the movie was set
in Tibet. There is a long history of legends of a paradise in the far east,
going back to Marco Polo and the tales of Prester John.]
It is early 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor, and Japan is rolling through the
Pacific. The US launches the Doolittle bombing raid on Tokyo.
Though the
physical damage from the raid was comparatively light, the psychological damage
was enormous. The Japanese government had promised the people of Japan that their
homeland would never be attacked. The Doolittle raid had shown that the empire
was not invulnerable after all. [Note: This was somewhat baffling, for the US
had no base within bomber range.] …. everyone wanted to know where the planes
had come from. Delighting in the mystery, [President Roosevelt] smiled broadly.
"The came from a secret base in Shangri-la," he
said.
– Doris Kearns Goodwin, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt:
The Home Front in World War II
Roosevelt was also punning. Shangri-La
was the name of the presidential retreat (which is currently called Camp David,
by Eisenhower's renaming).
And (according to one source), when Roosevelt similarly announced that two
battleships had gone "to Shangri-La", Berlin
radio confessed that reported that the German authorities had been unable to
find that place on the map.
Two more-typical examples:
0n a balmy April
day, as one enters the 50-acre enclave of masses of red and white azaleas,
dogwoods, giant willow oaks, and manicured lawns that set off Hendrix's
attractive buildings, the overwhelming impression is that this Shangri-La
in Conway, Arkansas, must be the most beautiful campus of them all.
– Loren Pope, Colleges That Change Lives… [etc.]
Best seen in late spring when the rhododendrons are in full bloom, the lush
greenery of Craggy Gardens feels like an Appalachian Shangri-la.
– Jamie Jensen, Road Trip USA: Cross-Country Adventures …[etc.]
Thanksgiving
This week, as those in the U.S. celebrate
the holiday of Thanksgiving, we will focus on words of gratitude and blessing.
It may be a short week, for the sad fact is that there seem to be very few such
words beyond the obvious and familiar ones like 'gratitude'.
Indeed even our first term-of-thanks is usually used ironically, though OED
gives only the positive sense. Our quotes amusingly illustrate the irony.
non nobis – 1. interjection, expressing gratitude or thanksgiving
(also 'non nobis, Domine'). from the next meaning 2. a hymn of that
title, used in 'popular entertainment. (Each meaning often ironic.)
The hymn takes the opening words of Psalm 115:1, saying "The glory of the
deed is not ours, but God's".
Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam
(Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name give glory
The hymn is, I understand, a breath-takingly
beautiful round in four-part a cappella harmony, written by Handel but
usually attributed to William Byrd (1543 – 1623).
In Shakespeare's Henry V the hymn celebrates the victory at Agincourt.
"Do we all holy rites: Let there be sung ‘Non Nobis' and ‘Te
Deum'." (This is an anachronism in that, at that time, the hymn had
not yet been written.) A modern version of that play converts the hymn to a
very different meaning.
In Doyle's score
for [Ken] Branagh's Henry V, the Non nobis theme can be found in several
moments of the film to evoke the waste of war.
– Sarah Hatchuel, Shakespeare
Below are three other ironic uses. In the
first two the hymn has become almost a drinking song at the end of a banquet.
In the last, the speaker saying, "Not me" to mean "Not my
fault," rather than to attribute glory to God. They are so much fun that I
quote at length.
'Pray, silence,
gentlemen, if you please, for Non Nobis!' shouts the
toast-master with stentorian lungs … The uninitiated portion of the guests
applaud Non nobis as vehemently as if it were a capital comic
song, greatly to the scandal of and indignation of the regular diners, who
immediately attempt to quell this sacrilegious approbation, by cries of 'Hush,
hush!' whereupon the others, mistaking these sounds for hisses, applaud more
tumultuously than before, and, by way of placing their approval beyond the
possibility of doubt, shout 'Encore!' most vociferously.
– Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz
We can eat no more. We are full of Bacchus and venison. But a great rap, tap
tap proclaimed grace, after which the [hired singers] sang out, "Non
Nobis'" and then the dessert and the speeches began. … Mr. Chisel,
the immortal toast-master, roared out, “Non Nobis;” and what is
called “the business of the evening” commenced.
– William Makepeace Thackeray, Sketches and Travels in London
the modern advocate, after having confounded all the ancients … will not be
satisfied to condemn the rest of the world without applauding himself; and
falling into a rapture upon the contemplation of his own wonderful
performance…. [He should] have as had as much grace as a French lawyer … who,
after a dull and tedious argument, that had wearied the court and the company,
when he went from the bar was heard muttering to himself, Non nobis,
Domine, non nobis; but this writer …. would not have [the
victory] ascribed to the grace of God, [or] have his own perfections and
excellencies owing to any thing else but the true force of this own modern learning:
and thereupon he falls into this sweet ecstasy of joy, wherein I shall leave
him till he come to himself.
– Sir William Temple, commenting on Swift's work, in J. Swift (ed.), Miscellanea.
The Third Part (1701).
beatitude – 1.
supreme blessedness or happiness 2. Heaven (in the sense of a place)
(also, any of the "blessed are" declarations in the Sermon on
the Mount)
The heaven definition, though not in OED, seems to me supported by
usage, such as that below. The first will help you remember the word.
Sure, you’ll be
playing a harp in beatitude
(And a quare sight you will be in that attitude)—
Some day, where gratitude seems but a platitude,
You’ll find your latitude, Barney McGee.
– Richard Hovey, Barney McGee
[note: "quare" = dialect for "queer"]
Afterlife: A great chasm separates the place of beatitude
from the place of fiery punishment (Luke 16:26). In the place of beatitude
people enjoy sumptuous banquets in the presence of God and the patriarchs (Matt
8:11), while the envious damned are compelled to witness (Luke 13:28).
– Raymond Edward Brown, An Introduction to New Testament Christology
Today's word is an obscure one. I include it
as exemplifying how far one must reach to find terms of gratitude. It is also,
of course, an eponym from Minerva, goddess of wisdom.
minerval – a gift given in gratitude by a pupil to a teacher; also a fee
paid to a schoolteacher [Wordcrafter: presumably one which is called, with
genteel tact, a 'gift'.]
On the Continent, character-building
`factories for gentlemen' are thin on the ground. Belgium has various private
academies for rich kids, the most famous being l'Abbaye de Maredsous, where
parents pay a 'minerval' proportionate to their income; Salem in
south Germany is a smart private school where Thomas Mann sent his children.
Otherwise, Eurotrash babes have to
slum it in Le Rosey, the boarding school in Switzerland that is the alma mater
of King Baudouin, the former Shah of Iran, the Duke of Kent, Prince
Victor-Emmanuel of Savoy and Prince Rainier of Monaco, as well as generation
upon generation of Metternichs, Borgheses and Hohenzollerns.
Or they get sent to school in England
– Rachel Johnson, The Spectator, Oct. 28, 2000
benison – a
blessing
Here are two very different example of a father withholding his benison from
his child.
He taught him some
Raleigh, / And some of Macaulay,
Till all of "Horatius" he
knew,
And the drastic, sarcastic, / Fantastic, scholastic
Philippics of "Junius,"
too.
He made him learn lots / Of the poems of Watts,
And frequently said he ignored,
On principle, any son's / Title to benison
Till he'd learned Tennyson's /
"Maud."
- Guy Wetmore Carryl
for
we
Have no such daughter, nor shall ever see
That face of hers again. Therefore be gone
Without our grace, our love, our benison.
- Shakespeare, King Lear
gramercy (interj.; obsolete) - used to express
1. thankfulness 2. surprise (as in 'mercy me!"). Various spellings.
[Old French grant = grand or great, + merci ‘reward for merit’.
So the phrase meant ‘may God reward you greatly’. The accent is on the second
syllable; contrast GRAMercy Park in New York City.]
"Have here
right good speed, sir, for your good will," quoth the canon, "grammercy
and farewell!"
– Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Canon's Yeoman's tale (Mackaye
rendering, 1904)
hosanna; hosannah (interj.) - used to express praise or adoration to God
[Hebrew for "Save us!"]