Ain't

In Allen Tate's novel The Fathers, a use of "ain't" gets a footnote:

I may as well say here that my father did not speak dialect but the standard English of the eighteenth century. In pronunciation the criterion was the oral tradition, not the way the word looked in print to an uneducated school-teacher. For example, though he wrote ate, he pronounced it et, as if it were the old past tense, eat. He used the double negative in conversation, as well as ain't, and he spoke the language with great ease at four levels: first, the level just described, conversation among family and friends; second, the speech of the "plain people abounding in many archaisms; third, the speech of the negroes, which was merely late seventeenth or early eighteenth English ossified; and fourth, the Johnsonian diction appropriate to formal occasions, a style that he could wield in perfect sentences four hundred words long. He would not have understood our conception of "correct English." Speech was like manners, an expression of sensibility and taste. This view no longer holds in an era of public schools and state universities.

The conversation would have been in the early 1850s, the speaker a man born about the turn of the century, resident in Fairfax County, Virginia.

State universities go a long way back in the upper south: there is "Mr. Jefferson's university" in Charlottesville, of course, but the University of North Carolina is older still. The attitude towards the state universities if not the schools seems much more of Tate's time than his narrator's.

 

Seven Times Daily

 Friday I took from the shelves Dorothy Day's autobiography The Long Loneliness, purchased some time ago but not yet read. The last sentence of the third paragraph runs

The just man fall seven times daily.

Unfortunately, she does not offer a source for the statement, and I remain in the dark. 

 

A Sort of Universal Self-Affirmation

 In A Reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit by Quentin Lauer, S.J., I noticed in the chapter "Dominance and Subjection" the remark that

The self-certainty with which this whole thing [the dialectical progress of self-consciousness] began inevitably involves a sort of universal self-affirmation (we see this in children).

 We do.

 Quite a while ago, a friend who had no children asked me what the "terrible twos" were about. I thought about this, and said that they were about discovering the subject-object distinction. Some years later, at the Paulist Center in Boston, I heard the homilist say exactly that. My recollection is that he implied that many of mature years still hadn't mastered the distinction.

Proverbs

 A while ago, I happened on Proverbs 18:2,

A fool takes no pleasure in understanding,
 but only in expressing personal opinion.

That struck me as describing a great deal of social media.

 I had been looking for Proverbs 24:16,

for though [the just] fall seven times, they will rise again;
but the wicked are overthrown by calamity.

 A math teacher of mine in high school, a member of the Christian Brothers (FCS) quoted that as saying that the just man falls seven times a day. He inferred from this that if you made only seven mistakes a day you were perfect. I don't think he graded that way; perhaps he said it to excuse his own occasional errors at the blackboard. The period of a day to cover the seven falls or stumbles must have been his own, I think.

I have once or twice quoted 24:16, to ESL classes, when students have preferred silence to the chance of making a mistake. 

 (All quotations are from the Revised Standard Version.) 

 

Plates

 The cabinets with our plates is in a corner of our kitchen with two exterior walls. During the winter that is the coldest corner. From at least December through February it is well to get dinner plates out of the cabinet to warm up for some time before dinner.

I was struck some years ago in reading Disraeli's novel Coningsby by the paragraph beginning

Lord Monmouth’s dinners at Paris were celebrated. It was generally agreed that they had no rivals; yet there were others who had as skilful cooks, others who, for such a purpose, were equally profuse in their expenditure. What, then, was the secret spell of his success? The simplest in the world, though no one seemed aware of it. His Lordship’s plates were always hot: whereas at Paris, in the best appointed houses, and at dinners which, for costly materials and admirable art in their preparation, cannot be surpassed, the effect is always considerably lessened, and by a mode the most mortifying: by the mere circumstance that every one at a French dinner is served on a cold plate.

Disraeli goes on to blame the custom on the poor quality of French porcelain:

 The reason of a custom, or rather a necessity, which one would think a nation so celebrated for their gastronomical taste would recoil from, is really, it is believed, that the ordinary French porcelain is so very inferior that it cannot endure the preparatory heat for dinner.

 No doubt French manufactures have improved over the last couple of centuries.

Augustine the African

 As a present for a recent birthday, I received a copy of Augustine the African by Catherine Conybeare. It is a short book, quickly read. Much of the matter will be familiar to anyone who has read Peter Brown's Augustine of Hippo. Conybeare gives greater emphasis to the African context of Augustine's life and work.

 On a number of points I wondered about her approach. She has an eye for the dramatic, and she exercises it in recounting the struggles with the Donatists. The question of the objective validity of the sacraments--in this case, baptism--gets a paragraph. The struggle with the Pelagians also gives one more of the drama of personal conflict than of doctrinal concerns. Yet Jaroslav Pelikan in a couple of places quotes Benjamin Breckenridge Warfield to the effect that the Reformation was the triumph of Augustine's theology of grace over Augustine's theology of the church. Given the importance of the Donatist controversy to the development of his doctrine of the church, and of the Pelagian controversy in refining his doctrine of Grace, the author might have given more space to the doctrinal concerns, and less to the ambiguous place of North Africa, or one North African, in the Roman system.

 The diction is also of our time. One finds "dog-whistle" where in one case "proof text" would be better, and in another perhaps "catch words". A chapter on the disorientation felt by Romans (broadly understood) after the Sack of Rome is "Roman Fragility". Of course I understand these, but will the readers of 2050 or 2100?

I am glad to have read the book, and will read it again. I may want to have more of St. Augustine's work handy for reference when I do.

No Riding on Sidewalks

 For two mornings, a bike was parked on the sidewalk of the bridge that carries 16th St. NW over Piney Branch Parkway. The second morning, I half wheeled, half dragged it south thirty yards or so to where I could leave it on some grass. The injunction "no riding on sidewalks"

particularly annoyed me.

I understand the attraction of bicycles and scooters to be rented for short rides. I do not like to have to pick my way past them where the last rider has chosen to leave them. Quite often this is in the middle of of a sidewalk, often enough it is in an inconvenient place on the sidewalk.

In most of Washington, DC, it is within the regulations to ride a bicycle on the sidewalk. Of course that may not be so for powered bicycles such as this one.