Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Hail Mary has been changed

ANGELICO, Fra Annunciation, c1450
The Hail Mary has been changed. Or rather, the Swedish translation has. Having gone to the trouble of learning the old one I am not going to be caught out again so it is Latin for me in future. At least one can be sure that no committee is going to get together and come up with yet another translation.

AVE MARIA, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.

Here is the rest of the Rosary. You can download it, format and print on a card. It needs to be in two columns to fit on one side of A4. But when one thinks about it, the prayer is undignified. Hailing is what you do when one wants to get a taxi driver to stop and pick you up. Our Lady is not a taxi and I have never heard of anyone calling "Ave" when they wanted one.

18 Black cab

Kommentarer

jaykay sa…
Erm, no, you wouldn't use "Ave" to a taxi, because you're not addressing or greeting the taxi directly, for a start!

English works on many levels, as I'm sure you know. The verb "to hail" as in to call a taxi is now practically archaic. No-one really refers to "hailing" anyone or anything anymore. But one should not confuse this sense of the verb with the vocative use of "hail", which is a greeting, nothing else. It's certainly not undignified to use it. It's archaic, certainly, but then so is the rest of the English text, with it's 16th century usages.
27 februari 2013 kl. 16:08
Physiocrat sa…
Nice pic of a GNR (I) 4-4-0 with a somersault signal in the background. I last heard the term "hail a cab" about twenty years ago. I can't think of another way of saying what you would do if you want to take a vacant cab not at a regular taxi rank.

English is a bit funny in its inconsistency. Olive oil is made of olives, maize oil is made from maize, but baby oil?
28 februari 2013 kl. 00:12
Skicka en kommentar

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer