I’ve been sucked into the world of 16th-century genealogy the past couple of weeks. It’s fascinating, infuriating, boring, all of the above. Sometimes you find genuinely useful information (useful in my world, anyway), and sometimes you find people with simply unbelievable names. I’m not talking about the William Fitzwilliams and the John St. Johns . . . check this out:
This is in Debrett’s, available at Archive.org.
I did NOT search for this term. It just popped up in my reading today. Before Sunday I had never seen it before in my life.
From the DNB’s entry on Wallis Warfield-Spencer-Simpson-Windsor, whom Edward VIII married in 1937 after abdicating the English throne:
Baldwin was convinced that this must lead to abdication; the king played with the idea of a morganatic marriage, a solution that would certainly have appealed to Mrs Simpson, but was determined to renounce the throne if that was the price he had to pay.
After failing to establish his right to the barony of L’Isle, he was created a peer in 1835 by his father-in-law, William IV., who had morganatically married the beautiful Mrs. Jordan.
morganatic
2. a. Designating or relating to a marriage in which a man of high rank marries a wife of lower rank, but neither the wife nor any children of the marriage have any claim to the possessions or title of the husband. Also (occas.): designating a similar arrangement between a woman of high rank and a man of lower rank.
I’ve been taking care of someone’s pet rabbit for the past few days. They told me that he bites, so to not reach out for him. Let him come to you. OK, so I tried that. But when he came to me from behind the chair where he was chilling, he downright charged at me. Needless to say, I pulled my hand back before he reached me. When I pulled away, he turned on a dime and went back behind the chair.
I was going to herd him back to his cage, but the only stick-like thing I could find was a fireplace poker. No problem—I wasn’t going to stab or beat him with it. But when I reached the poker behind the chair, he charged at it, bonking his forehead on the poker part. OOPS.
Then tonight, he went in his cage all by himself, but when I walked up to the cage later he started going aggro on me, running back and forth. Then he jumped up at me, but smashed his head into the top of the cage (the cage is about 18″ high; he’s about 12″ high on hind legs). I am guessing this little guy is a little imbalanced? Oh, and he also crapped under the chair in the master bedroom, since I left him out of the cage last night (couldn’t get him back in—what was I supposed to do?).
Owners, please come back on time!
Shame on you, Alex Williams! And shame on your editor for not throwing this one back in your face:
Mr. Perelman exercised his naming right this year, following Ms. Cohen’s death from ovarian cancer, despite the fact the couple had divorced in 1994.
This is ambiguous: we know you mean that it’s odd that he would name a building after someone he divorced, but the meaning that first hits the reader is that their divorce did nothing to prevent her death from ovarian cancer.
Interesting article, BTW.
The Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion takes place every 10 years, and they are meeting this year, 16 July - 3 August. From what I have been reading the past few years, the Anglican ship has run aground on some nasty rocks (remember Gene Robertson? that’s one of the rocks); and the news of the past few weeks and days makes it sound like the ship is finally ready to break apart. I’m guessing that from this summer onward it is all downhill, fast, for the Anglican Church (incl. the American Episcopal Church, who will continue pretending to be orthodox Christians until they wake up one day and realize they’ve become Unitarians. Or until all the true orthodox Episcopalians defect to the oversight of Ugandan bishops.).
The AC is supposed to decide soon whether to allow women as bishops. Now several hundred Anglican clergy are in talks with the Vatican, trying to “establish closer ties.” Inevitably this will result in the conversion of many of them, since they feel that if they want to remain true to the Gospel, they have no choice but to leave the Anglican Church. No—rather than “they feel,” I should write, “it is the fact that.”
What I don’t get: these same clergy were, apparently, outwardly tolerant of women priests . . . but women bishops is a bridge too far?
A quotation from one of the bishops ready to swim the Tiber:
“The internal pressure of the Anglican communion has pushed us apart and we’re committed to greater unity with Rome. There can be no future for Christianity in Europe without Rome.”
So true. Yes, the Catholic Church contains divisions and warring elements, but its unsurpassed moral authority and constant defense of the deposit of faith make it the only credible Christian church visible on the world stage. May the Anglican “defectors” find a warm welcome home, after nearly 500 years in a far country.
And then let’s get all the Anglicans back in the Catholic Church . . . we want Westminster Abbey back! 
Wasted 3 hours on Monday going to, sitting through, and returning home from “Prince Caspian.” I reread the book a week ago. The movie is not at all faithful to the characterizations in the book, and takes large liberties with the plot. The allegory of the book is that the characters need to learn to humble themselves before they are allowed to see Aslan—before they are permitted the “beatific vision” of God. Aslan helps those who abase themselves and rely on his strength instead of their own. The movie keeps this idea, marginally; it seems to suggest that it is a high virtue to kick as much ass as possible before seeking out Aslan.
The parts I liked best were when the Telmarines were building the wooden bridge at Beruna. (In the book, a stone bridge is already there, but the moviemakers needed to add the gradual completion of some public works project to add suspense and act as a countdown to the final confrontation.) I liked these parts because they reminded me of “Bridge on the River Kwai.”
I’m thoroughly convinced that it’s a terrible idea to mix live human actors with animated talking creatures. It aims at moving us to an enchanted world, but instead merely breeds disgust at myself when I realize that I’ve just paid $6.25 to watch armored teddy bears play out questions concerning the fate of the universe.
Kinda funny how the bad guys in the movie all have Spanish accents. In English terms, and from Lewis’s Renaissance background, this means that they are Catholics. And to Renaissance Englishmen, if you were Spanish or Catholic, you were ipso facto a spy and a traitor to England. It’s like the villains in Rocky IV and the 2nd and 3rd Rambo films: of course they are all Russians! What else could they be? (I guess they could have been French, but come on, Rambo against French opponents?)
Enough! Save your money and time and don’t bother with this movie.
George Takai, “Sulu” from “Star Trek,” is “getting married.” (If only he went by a nickname, I could have put everything in that sentence in quotes.)
Takai was jubilant, saying “it’s going to be the only day like this in our lives and it is the only day like this in the history of America.”
Yeah, not at all like the day in Massachusetts in 2004, when the state started issuing marriage licenses to homosexuals.
This editorial at the Wall Street Journal, “The Audacity of Death,” makes it as clear as can be that Barack Obama supports the “right” of women to kill their own babies even if they have been born alive and are completely outside the womb.
Do I need to say anything else?
This weekend I read Lorenzo Valla’s Treatise on the Donation of Constantine and C.S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian. Valla was for work; Lewis for pleasure, and so that I would be better able to compare the movie to the book when I eventually go and see the movie.
Valla is great. He totally rips the popes apart by showing that the “Donation of Constantine” is a forgery. This was the document that medieval pope after medieval pope claimed that Constantine gave to Pope Sylvester, essentially giving him dominion over Italy and the whole Roman Empire. Valla’s treatise is considered the founding document in textual criticism—criticism of a text based on a historical awareness of style and meaning. When a document claims to be by Constantine but uses phrases that did not gain currency until 400 years later, you know the document is a forgery. His scorn for Latin barbarisms warms the student-paper-marking portion of my heart.
I had to laugh at Lewis . . . the kids in Prince Caspian are “cool” because they use such current slang. The best example of this is Edmund’s saying “Great Scott!” about three different times. But Edmund also claims that he can’t see Aslan because the light is “rum.” If you look up “rum” in the OED, the first entry says “Good, fine, excellent; great.” The second entry says “Odd, strange, queer. Also, bad, spurious.” If you ask me, that’s quite a rum definition.
Another word Lewis loves—nay, overuses—is “bivouac.” People in this book never camp, they bivouac. And the place where they sleep at night is not a camp but a bivouac. I’m guessing he just means they slept outdoors without tents? The OED gives a great extra word that I’m going to use from now on: “bivvy-bag”. No more sleeping bags for me!
bivouac bag n. Mountaineering a waterproof sleeping bag used outdoors instead of a tent; cf. bivvy bag
Lewis, while throwing in dated phrases like “Great Scott,” also throws in some seriously dated terms, in order to lend Narnia an antique feel. King Miraz has the best one of these: he refers to his “jackanapes nephew” (i.e., Caspian). The only other place I’ve heard this heavily 16th-century word (aside from my first reading of Prince Caspian, which I had forgotten entirely) is in the movie Cromwell. There the line is something like, “who is this jackanapes, who would mouth such treasons in your presence?”
Jackanapes: “as common noun: One who is like an ape in tricks, airs, or behaviour; a ridiculous upstart; a pert, impertinent fellow, who assumes ridiculous airs; a coxcomb. (The current use.)”
Leave it to the OED to claim that a word like “jackanapes” has a “current use.”
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