PARVUM OPUS

Number 72

SOMETHING OLD

Where I live, we're expecting a plague of locusts any day. They're actually 17-year cicadas that live underground for 16 years and 11 months, then work their way to the surface for a brief mating frenzy before they die, when their offspring burrow down a foot or so and stay there for their almost-17 years. The kid behind the counter at the drugstore said, "What's the purpose of their lives?" Fred says life loves itself, but if I get a bit of writing inspiration from them, then from my point of view they've served a better purpose than sucking on roots in the dark.

And my point is: I really want to say "plague of locusts" instead of "infestation of cicadas." It comes to the tongue, or to the typing fingertips, naturally and easily. I assumed it was a phrase from the Bible, but a search in The Unbound Bible doesn't turn up the exact phrase, although there are quite a few references to locusts and threats of locusts, and of course John the Baptist ate them along with wild honey. I've heard that some people have eaten the 17-year cicadas on pizza.

More often we unknowingly use phrases that do come directly from either the Bible or Shakespeare. I didn't know that "out of the mouth of babes" comes from the Bible, for instance. These two sources have contributed much to the English language, so even if you haven't read much of either, you know more of them than you think, even if you're not tipped off by a "thou" or "thee" or "doest". Some words and expressions probably would have changed totally or disappeared if they didn't persist in these bits of living linguistic history.

You probably know that Jesus said, "Suffer little children to come unto me," yet if you were asked to define "suffer" the first meaning to come to mind would have to do with pain, to endure pain. However, it is used many times (I refer to the King James translation) to mean something like "allow". To get technical about it, see www.yourdictionary.com:

Middle English suffren, from Old French sufrir, from Vulgar Latin sufferre, from Latin sufferre: sub-, sub- + ferre, to carry; see bher-1 in Indo-European roots.

(The bher-to-ferre change would have depended on the relation of the b-p-v-f sounds.)

So, to carry, to bear, to allow ~ to feel pain. It's a logical connection but if you were inventing a language, would you come up with this development in the meaning? I'm not sure I would. Working backwards, however, or rather playing backwards, playing with the biblical sense of "suffer", I ask if we shouldn't think of pain as something we allow rather than something we have no control over.

Some years ago I discovered a Shakespearean source for a line in one of Jane Austen's unfinished novels, Sanditon, where she writes about a rich girl called Miss Lambe, who'd come to England to enter a private school: "about seventeen, half mulatto, chilly and tender, had a maid of her own, was to have the best room in the lodgings, and was also of the first consequence in every plan of Mrs Griffiths." How would you interpret a character described as "chilly and tender"? Delicate physically and sensitive emotionally, reserved and cool, perhaps? By chance, while I was reading commentary on Sanditon, I was also taking a Shakespeare course, and found that in All's Well That Ends Well, Act IV, Scene V, a clown named Lavache says:

I am for the house with the narrow gate, which I take to be too little for pomp to enter. Some that humble themselves may; but the many will be too chill and tender, and they'll be for the flow'ry way that leads to the broad gate and the great fire.

Obviously Jane Austen read Shakespeare, and her "chilly and tender" Miss Lambe would have been a girl treading the primrose path (see below). This particular phrase, "chill [or chilly] and tender," has not become commonplace, as for instance the following, which have become so familiar as to be clichés, or even invisible:

(From www.pathguy.com/shakeswo.htm, which lists many more, plus words coined by Shakespeare.)

You'll recognize a few book, movie, and music titles in here. Some of these seem like inevitable phrasings to us now, because we're used to them. Maybe they were already in use earlier and Shakespeare just picked them up. For instance, "stony hearted" seems like an obvious metaphor. But at one time these phrases must have seemed ingenious and fresh, and most of us wouldn't have the wit to invent them.

Does this mean we should all become experts on the Bible and Shakespeare? No. But it does mean that some familiar phrases carry more or different meaning than what we think, as in the example from Sanditon. Perhaps the most familiar example of misuse of a common phrase is "an eye for an eye," when people forget or don't know that Jesus actually was repudiating this old principle of retaliation.

On the other hand, "what a piece of work is man" (from Hamlet) seems to have retained or returned to its original ironic, bitter intent ~ "He's a real piece of work!"

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