The Christian Rats

The Christian Rats

Here’s an interesting example of how language and its idioms change through the passing of years and movement between different cultures.

In Shakespeare’s lifetime (1564-1616) there was a common expression, “to be as hungry as a church mouse”. This expression came about because in those days churches had neither kitchens nor storerooms, unlike eating places and homes, so a mouse that tried to live in a church could literally starve to death.

During the next few hundred years, however, the saying became “to be as poor as a church mouse”. This change is easy to explain, for the poor of every nation have always struggled to get enough food to eat well.

Then, in the nineteenth century, when Christian missions began to spread throughout the world, establishing churches and the English language, this revised expression naturally travelled with them.

Fast-forward to our era, and the expression has changed again. I came across this interesting passage recently in the introduction to a book discussing the proper Christian approach to wealth:

‘Once upon a time, an extremely poor person used to be likened to a church rat. The expression was ‘as poor as a church rat’. This meant that the Church/believers were so poor that they barely managed to survive and so could not have anything left over for the rat in the Church to feed upon.’

Here, not only has the mouse become a rat but through personification the rat itself has become a Christian!

This is yet another fascinating example of language change. I hope you found it as interesting as I did.

© Kenneth Rowley 2015

gossip

I've spent a lot of time teaching Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and amongst the many phrases and speeches that now inhabit my mind is Capulet's stinging put-down of the Nurse: "Smatter with your gossips, go!"
Gossipping is a universal human trait, isn't it? It's the core of TV soaps and probably the very root of story-telling in its most basic form.
But the word gossip derives (like gospel) from Christian associations: it was originally godsibbs, i.e., godparents. Because godparents looked out for your welfare and often told stories about you (especially when you were still a babe), the word came to be connected with friends and acquaintances and the stories that they tell about the people they know. Add a little bit of morphing with the spelling, and there you have it--our modern gossip.

True love

The characteristics of true love are outlined in sonnet 116; the poet declares true love to be constant, unafraid of the present or the future, a guide, and not subject to time.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

I remember well the hour that my mother died. She was sixty years old, in a hospice, and for some time had been daily losing her fight against cancer. I arrived at the hospice perhaps 10 minutes after she died, and embraced my father. He looked at me, with tears in his eyes, and said, 'I loved that girl.' The words struck me: sixty years old, and still a girl: indeed love 'alters not... even to the edge of doom'.

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In praise of procreation

Shakespeare's second sonnet is a paean that praises procreation as a preserver of beauty:

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,

And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,

Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,

Will be a tatter'd weed, of small worth held:

Then being ask'd where all thy beauty lies,

Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,

To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,

Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.

How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use,

If thou couldst answer 'This fair child of mine

Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,'

Proving his beauty by succession thine!

This were to be new made when thou art old,

And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.

This explains in part why parents rejoice in their offspring and why we are so happy for our new-parent friends. We think of our loved ones, who, like us, are showing signs of life's wear and tear, and then look at their sons and daughters (the 'treasure of [their] lusty days') and say, 'how cute!' In a very real sense, since cell replaces cell all down our ancestral line, procreation ensures that our 'eternal summer shall not fade'.

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