People of all sorts of genders are reporting great difficulty, these days, in selecting the proper words to refer to those of the female persuasion. "Lady," "woman," and "girl" are all perfectly good words, but misapplying them can earn one anything from the charge of vulgarity to a good swift smack. We are messing here with matters of deference, condescension, respect, bigotry, and two vague concepts, age and rank. It is troubling enough to get straight who is really what. Those who deliberately misuse the terms in a misbegotten attempt at flattery are asking for it. A woman is any grown-up female person. A girl is the un-grown-up version. If you call a wee thing with chubby cheeks and pink hair ribbons a "woman," you will probably not get into trouble, and if you do, you will be able to handle it because she will be under three feet tall. However, if you call a grown-up by a child's name for the sake of implying that she has a youthful body, you are also implying that she has a brain to match.
In the corner room at the club, members gathered to read these broadsheets, and some liked the way Karpushka jeered at the French, saying: "They will swell up with Russian cabbage, burst with our buckwheat porridge, and choke themselves with cabbage soup. They are all dwarfs and one peasant woman will toss three of them with a hayfork." Others did not like that tone and said it was stupid and vulgar. It was said that Rostopchin had expelled all Frenchmen and even all foreigners from Moscow, and that there had been some spies and agents of Napoleon among them; but this was told chiefly to introduce Rostopchin's witty remark on that occasion. The foreigners were deported to Nizhni by boat, and Rostopchin had said to them in French: "Rentrez en vousmemes; entrez dans la barque, et n'en faites pas une barque de Charon." * There was talk of all the government offices having been already removed from Moscow, and to this Shinshin's witticism was added--that for that alone Moscow ought to be grateful to Napoleon. It was said that Mamonov's regiment would cost him eight hundred thousand rubles, and that Bezukhov had spent even more on his, but that the best thing about Bezukhov's action was that he himself was going to don a uniform and ride at the head of his regiment without charging anything for the show.
It was at the epoch when the ancient classical romance which, after having been Clelie, was no longer anything but Lodoiska, still noble, but ever more and more vulgar, having fallen from Mademoiselle de Scuderi to Madame Bournon-Malarme, and from Madame de Lafayette to Madame Barthelemy-Hadot, was setting the loving hearts of the portresses of Paris aflame, and even ravaging the suburbs to some extent. Madame Thenardier was just intelligent enough to read this sort of books. She lived on them. In them she drowned what brains she possessed. This had given her, when very young, and even a little later, a sort of pensive attitude towards her husband, a scamp of a certain depth, a ruffian lettered to the extent of the grammar, coarse and fine at one and the same time, but, so far as sentimentalism was concerned, given to the perusal of Pigault-Lebrun, and "in what concerns the sex," as he said in his jargon--a downright, unmitigated lout. His wife was twelve or fifteen years younger than he was. Later on, when her hair, arranged in a romantically drooping fashion, began to grow gray, when the Magaera began to be developed from the Pamela, the female Thenardier was nothing but a coarse, vicious woman, who had dabbled in stupid romances. Now, one cannot read nonsense with impunity. The result was that her eldest daughter was named Eponine; as for the younger, the poor little thing came near being called Gulnare; I know not to what diversion, effected by a romance of Ducray-Dumenil, she owed the fact that she merely bore the name of Azelma.
From the latter part of the 5th century B.C. Athens became ever more important as a literary centre, and Attic prose became the model for the later [Greek: koinê], which grew up as a consequence of the decay of the local dialects. For this decay there were several reasons. If the Athenian empire had survived the Peloponnesian War, Attic influence would no doubt soon have permeated the whole of that empire. This consummation was postponed. Attic became the court language of Macedon, and, when Alexander's conquests led to the foundation of great new towns, like Alexandria, filled with inhabitants from all parts of the Greek world, this dialect furnished a basis for common intercourse. Naturally the resultant dialect was not pure Attic. There were in it considerable traces of Ionic. In Attica itself the dialect was less uniform than elsewhere even in the 5th century B.C., because Athens was a centre of empire, literature and commerce. Like every other language which is not under the dominion of the schoolmaster, it borrowed the names of foreign objects which it imported from foreign lands, not only from those of Greek-speaking peoples, but also from Egypt, Persia, Lydia, Phoenicia, Thrace and elsewhere. The Ionians were great seafarers, and from them Athens borrowed words for seacraft and even for the tides: [Greek: amtôtis] "ebb," [Greek: rhachia] "high tide," an Ionic word [Greek: rhêchiê] spelt in Attic fashion. From the Dorians it borrowed words connected with war and sport: [Greek: lochagos, kunagos], &c. A soldier of fortune like Xenophon, who spent most of his life away from Athens, introduced not only strange words but strange grammatical constructions also into his literary compositions. With Aristotle, not a born Athenian but long resident in Athens, the [Greek: koinê] may be said to have begun. Some characteristics of Attic foreigners found it hard to acquire--its subtle use of particles and its accent. Hence in Hellenistic Greek particles are comparatively rare. According to Cicero, Theophrastus, who came from as near Attica as Eretria in Euboea, was easily detected by a market-woman as no Athenian after he had lived thirty years in Athens. Thoucritus, an Athenian, who was taken prisoner in the Peloponnesian War and lived for many years in Epirus as a slave, was unable to recover the Athenian accent on his return, and his family lay under the suspicion that they were an alien's children, as his son tells us in Demosthenes' speech "Against Eubulides." In the [Greek: koinê] there were several divisions, though the line between them is faint and irregular. There was a [Greek: koinê] of literary men like Polybius and of carefully prepared state documents, as at Magnesia or Pergamum; and a different [Greek: koinê] of the vulgar which is represented to us in its Egyptian form in the Pentateuch, in a later and at least partially Palestinian form in the Gospels. Still more corrupt is the language which we find in the ill-written and ill-spelt private letters found amongst the Egyptian papyri. Not out of the old dialects but out of this [Greek: koinê] arose modern Greek, with a variety of dialects no less bewildering than that of ancient Greek. In one place more rapidly, in another more slowly, the characteristics of modern Greek begin to appear. As we have seen, in Boeotia the vowels and diphthongs began to pass into the characteristic sounds of modern Greek four centuries before Christ. Dorian dialects illustrate early the passing of the old aspirate [Greek: th], the sound of which was like the final t in English _bit_, into a sound like the English _th_ in _thin_, _pith_, which it still retains in modern Greek. The change of [gamma] between vowels into a y sound was charged by the comic poets against Hyperbolus the demagogue about 415 B.C. Only when the Attic sound changes stood isolated amongst the Greek dialects did they give way in the [Greek: koinê] to Ionic. Thus the forms with -[Greek: ss]- instead of -[Greek: tt]- won the day, while modern Greek shows that sometimes the -[Greek: rr]- which Attic shared with some Doric dialects and Arcadian was retained, and that sometimes the Ionic -[Greek: rs]-, which was also Lesbian and partly Doric, took its place. In other cases, where Ionic and Attic did not agree, forms came in which were different from either: the genitives of masculine a stems were now formed as in Doric with [alpha], but the analogy of the other cases may have been the effective force. The form [Greek: naos] "temple," instead of Ionic [Greek: nêos], Attic [Greek: neôs], can only be Doric.[1] In the first five centuries of the Christian era came in the modern Greek characteristics of Itacism and vowel contraction, of the pronunciation of [Greek: mp] and [Greek: nt] as _mb_ and _nd_ and many other sound changes, the loss of the dative and the confusion of the 1st with the 3rd declension, the dropping of the -[Greek: mi] conjugation, the loss of the optative and the assimilation of the imperfect and second aorist endings to those of the first aorist.[2] There were meantime spasmodic attempts at the revival of the old language. Lucian wrote Attic dialogue with a facility almost equal to Plato; the old dialect was revived in the inscriptions of Sparta; Balbilla, a lady-in-waiting on Hadrian's empress, wrote epigrams in Aeolic, and there were other attempts of the same kind. But they were only _tours de force_, [Greek: kêpoi Adônidos], whose flowers had no root in the spoken language and therefore could not survive. Even in the hands of a cultivated man like Plutarch the [Greek: koinê] of the 1st century A.D. looks entirely different from Attic Greek. Apart from non-Attic constructions, which are not very numerous, the difference consists largely in the new vocabulary of the philosophical schools since Aristotle, whose jargon had become part of the language of educated men in Plutarch's time, and made a difference in the language not unlike that which has been brought about in English by the development of the natural sciences. It is hardly necessary to say that these changes, whether of the [Greek: koinê] or of modern Greek, did not of necessity impair the powers of the language as an organ of expression; if elaborate inflection were a necessity for the highest literary merit, then we must prefer Cædmon to Milton and Cynewulf to Shakespeare. Entry: 4
In composing these pieces, of very varied character, the jongleurs have practised an art which was in many respects rudimentary, but sincere and simple. The student of language finds the rich vocabulary of the fabliaux much more attractive to him than the conventionality of the serious religious and amatory poems of the same age. The object of the writers was the immediate amusement of their audience; by reference to familiar things, they hoped to arouse a quick and genuine merriment. Hence their incorrectness and their negligence are balanced by a delightful ease and absence of pedantry, and in the fabliaux we get closer than elsewhere to the living diction of medieval France. It is true that if we extend too severe a judgment to these pieces, we may find ourselves obliged to condemn them altogether. An instructed French critic, vexed with their faults, has gone so far as to say that "the subjects of these tales are degrading, their inspiration nothing better than flat and cruel derision, their distinguishing features rascality, vulgarity and platitude of style." From one point of view, this condemnation of the fabliau is hardly too severe. But such scholars as Gaston Paris and Paul Meyer have not failed to emphasize other sides to the question. They have praised, in the general laxity of style and garrulity of the middle ages, the terseness of the jongleurs; in the period of false ornament, their fidelity to nature; in a time of general vagueness, the sharp and picturesque outlines of their art. One feature of the fabliaux, however, cannot be praised and yet must not be overlooked. In no other section of the world's literature is the scorn and hatred of women so prominent. It is difficult to account for the anti-feminine rage which pervades the fabliaux, and takes hideous shapes in such examples as _Le Valet aux deux femmes_, _Le Pêcheur de Pont-sur-Seine_ and _Chicheface et Bigorne_. Probably this was a violent reaction against the extravagant cult of woman as expressed in the contemporary _lais_ as well as in the legends of saints. The exaggeration was not greater in the one case than in the other, and it is probable that the exaltation was made endurable to those who listened to the trouvères by the corresponding degradation. We must remember, too, that those who listened were not nobles or clerks, they were the common people. The fabliaux were _fabellae ignobilium_, little stories told to amuse persons of low degree, who were irritated by the moral pretensions of their superiors. Entry: FABLIAU
On the whole, the consonantal system is much the same as in other Indian languages. Nasalization of long vowels is very common, especially in Konkani. In this article it is indicated by the sign ~ placed over the affected vowel. The palatals are pronounced as in Skr. in words borrowed from that language or from Hindostani, and also in Marathi _tadbhavas_ before _i_, _i_, _e_ or _y_. Thus, _cand_ (_tatsama_), fierce; _jama_ (Hindostani), collected; _cikhal_ (M. _tadbhava_), mud. In other cases they are pronounced _ts_, _tsh_, _dz_, _dzh_ respectively. Thus _tsakar_ (for _cakar_), a servant; _dzane_ (for _jane_), to go. There are two _s_-sounds in the standard dialect which are very similarly distinguished. _S_, pronounced like an English _sh_, is used before _i_, _i_, _e_ or _y_; and _s_, as in English "sin," elsewhere. Thus, _simphi_, a caste-name; _sil_, a stone; _set_, a field; _syam_, dark blue; but _sap_, a snake; _sumar_ (Persian _shumar_), an estimate; _stri_, a woman. In the dialects _s_ is practically the only sibilant used, and that is changed by the vulgar speakers of Konkani to _h_ (again as in north-western India). Aspirated letters show a tendency to lose their aspiration, especially in Konkani. Thus, _bhik_ (for _bhikh_), alms, quoted above; _hat_ (Pr. _hattho_), a hand. In Konkani we have words such as _boin_, a sister, against standard _bhain_; _ger_, standard _ghari_, in a house; _ami_, standard _amhi_, we. Here again we have agreement with north-western India. Generally speaking Marathi closely follows Maharastra when that differs from the Prakrits of other parts of India. Thus we have Skr. _vrajati_, Maharastri _vaccai_ (instead of _vajjai_), he goes; Konkani _votsu_, to go; Sauraseni _genhiduim_, Maharastri _ghettum_, to take; Marathi _ghet
The scene of the second and the fourth is laid at Cos, and the speaking characters in each are never more than three. In Mime I. the old nurse, now the professional go-between or bawd, calls on Metriche, whose husband has been long away in Egypt, and endeavours to excite her interest in a most desirable young man, fallen deeply in love with her at first sight. After hearing all the arguments Metriche declines with dignity, but consoles the old woman with an ample glass of wine, this kind being always represented with the taste of Mrs Gamp. II. is a monologue by the [Greek: Pornoboskos] ("Whoremonger") prosecuting a merchant-trader for breaking into his establishment at night and attempting to carry off one of the inmates, who is produced in court. The vulgar blackguard, who is a stranger to any sort of shame, remarking that he has no evidence to call, proceeds to a peroration in the regular oratorical style, appealing to the Coan judges not to be unworthy of their traditional glories. In fact, the whole oration is also a burlesque in every detail of an Attic speech at law; and in this case we have the material from which to estimate the excellence of the parody. In III. a desperate mother brings to the schoolmaster a truant urchin, with whom neither she nor his incapable old father can do anything. In a voluble stream of interminable sentences she narrates his misdeeds and implores the schoolmaster to flog him. The boy accordingly is hoisted on another's back and flogged; but his spirit does not appear to be subdued, and the mother resorts to the old man after all. IV. is a visit of two poor women with an offering to the temple of Asclepius at Cos. While the humble cock is being sacrificed, they turn, like the women in the _Ion_ of Euripides, to admire the works of art; among them a small boy strangling a vulpanser--doubtless the work of Boëthus that we know--and a sacrificial procession by Apelles, "the Ephesian," of whom we have an interesting piece of contemporary eulogy. The oily sacristan is admirably painted in a few slight strokes. V. brings us very close to some unpleasant facts of ancient life. The jealous woman accuses one of her slaves, whom she has made her favourite, of infidelity; has him bound and sent degraded through the town to receive 2000 lashes; no sooner is he out of sight than she recalls him to be branded "at one job." The only pleasing person in the piece is the little maidservant--permitted liberties as a _verna_ brought up in the house--whose ready tact suggests to her mistress an excuse for postponing execution of a threat made in ungovernable fury. VI. is a friendly chat or a private conversation. The subject is an ugly one, but the dialogue is as clever and amusing as the rest, with some delicious touches. Our interest is engaged here in a certain Kerdon, the artistic shoemaker, to whom we are introduced in VII. (the name had already become generic for the shoemaker as the typical representative of retail trade), a little bald man with a fluent tongue, complaining of hard times, who bluffs and wheedles by turns. VII. opens with a mistress waking up her maids to listen to her dream; but we have only the beginning, and the other fragments are very short. Entry: HERODAS
It has not been found possible to determine, before experiment, whether any given man or woman will prove capable of the hallucinatory experiences. Many subjects with strong powers of "visualization," or seeing things "in the mind's eye," cannot scry; others are successful in various degrees. We might expect persons who have experienced spontaneous visual hallucinations, of the kind vulgarly styled "ghosts" or "wraiths," to succeed in inducing pictures in a glass ball. As a matter of fact such persons sometimes can and sometimes cannot see pictures in the way of crystal-gazing; while many who can see in the crystal have had no spontaneous hallucinations. It is useless to make experiments with hysterical and visionary people, "whose word no man relies on"; they may have the hallucinatory experiences, but they would say that they had in any case. Entry: A
Since 1849 his connexion with the Indian army had been practically severed; in 1861 he definitely entered the service of the foreign office as consul at Fernando Po, whence he was shifted successively to Santos in Brazil (1865), Damascus (1869), and Trieste (1871), holding the last post till his death on the 20th of October 1890. Each of these posts produced its corresponding books: Fernando Po led to the publishing of _Wanderings in West Africa_ (1863), _Abeokuta and the Cameroons_ (1863), _A Mission to Gelele, king of Dahomé_ (1864), and _Wit and Wisdom from West Africa_ (1865). The _Highlands of the Brazil_ (1869) was the result of four years' residence and travelling; and _Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay_ (1870) relate to a journey across South America to Peru. Damascus suggested _Unexplored Syria_ (1872), and might have led to much better work, since no consulate in either hemisphere was more congenial to Burton's taste and linguistic studies; but he mismanaged his opportunities, got into trouble with the foreign office, and was removed to Trieste, where his Oriental prepossessions and prejudices could do no harm, but where, unfortunately, his Oriental learning was thrown away. He did not, however, abandon his Eastern studies or his Eastern travels. Various fresh journeys or revisitings of familiar scenes are recorded in his later books, such as _Zanzibar_ (1872), _Ultima Thule_ (1875), _Etruscan Bologna_ (1876), _Sind Revisited_ (1877), _The Land of Midian_ (1879) and _To the Gold Coast for Gold_ (1883). None of these had more than a passing interest. Burton had not the charm of style or imagination which gives immortality to a book of travel. He wrote too fast, and took too little pains about the form. His blunt, disconnected sentences and ill-constructed chapters were full of information and learning, and contained not a few thrusts for the benefit of government or other people, but they were not "readable." There was something ponderous about his very humour, and his criticism was personal and savage. By far the most celebrated of all his books is the translation of the "Arabian Nights" (_The Thousand Nights and a Night_, 16 vols., privately printed, 1885-1888), which occupied the greater part of his leisure at Trieste. As a monument of his Arabic learning and his encyclopaedic knowledge of Eastern life this translation was his greatest achievement. It is open to criticism in many ways; it is not so exact in scholarship, nor so faithful to its avowed text, as might be expected from his reputation; but it reveals a profound acquaintance with the vocabulary and customs of the Muslims, with their classical idiom as well as their vulgarest "Billingsgate," with their philosophy and modes of thought as well as their most secret and most disgusting habits. Burton's "anthropological notes," embracing a wide field of pornography, apart from questions of taste, abound in valuable observations based upon long study of the manners and the writings of the Arabs. The translation itself is often marked by extraordinary resource and felicity in the exact reproduction of the sense of the original; Burton's vocabulary was marvellously extensive, and he had a genius for hitting upon the right word; but his fancy for archaic words and phrases, his habit of coining words, and the harsh and rugged style he affected, detract from the literary quality of the work without in any degree enhancing its fidelity. With grave defects, but sometimes brilliant merits, the translation holds a mirror to its author. He was, as has been well said, an Elizabethan born out of time; in the days of Drake his very faults might have counted to his credit. Of his other works, _Vikram and the Vampire, Hindu Tales_ (1870), and a history of his favourite arm, _The Book of the Sword_, vol. i. (1884), unfinished, may be mentioned. His translation of _The Lusiads of Camoens_ (1880) was followed (1881) by a sketch of the poet's life. Burton had a fellow-feeling for the poet adventurer, and his translation is an extraordinarily happy reproduction of its original. A manuscript translation of the "Scented Garden," from the Arabic, was burnt by his widow, acting in what she believed to be the interests of her husband's reputation. Burton married Isabel Arundell in 1861, and owed much to her courage, sympathy and passionate devotion. Her romantic and exaggerated biography of her husband, with all its faults, is one of the most pathetic monuments which the unselfish love of a woman has ever raised to the memory of her hero. Another monument is the Arab tent of stone and marble which she built for his tomb at Mortlake. Entry: BURTON
As to the qualifications of the king: he had had the good fortune not to be educated for the throne. Without much learning and sceptical in religious matters, he had the lively intelligence of the Gascon, more subtle than profound, more brilliant than steady. Married to a woman of loose morals, and afterwards to a devout Italian, he was gross and vulgar in his appetites and pleasures. He had retained all the habits of a country gentleman of his native Béarn, careless, familiar, boastful, thrifty, cunning, combined since his sojourn at the court of the Valois with a taint of corruption. He worked little but rapidly, with none of the bureaucratic pedantry of a Philip II. cloistered in the dark towers of the Escurial. Essentially a man of action and a soldier, he preserved his tone of command after he had reached the throne, the inflexibility of the military chief, the conviction of his absolute right to be master. Power quickly intoxicated him, and his monarchy was therefore anything but parliamentary. His personality was everything, institutions nothing. If, at the gathering of the notables at Rouen in 1596, Henry IV. spoke of putting himself in tutelage, that was but preliminary to a demand for money. The states-general, called together ten times in the 16th century, and at the death of Henry III. under promise of convocation, were never assembled. To put his absolute right beyond all control he based it upon religion, and to this sceptic disobedience became a heresy. He tried to make the clergy into an instrument of government by recalling the Jesuits, who had been driven away in 1594, partly from fear of their regicides, partly because they have always been the best teachers of servitude; and he gave the youth of the nation into the hands of this cosmopolitan and ultramontane clerical order. His government was personal, not through departments; he retained the old council though reducing its members; and his ministers, taken from every party, were never--not even Sully--anything more than mere clerks, without independent position, mere instruments of his good pleasure. Fortunately this was not always capricious. Entry: A