PHILOLOGIA

You remember how actors used to be told that if they were acting a crowd scene, they all had to murmur "Rhubarb Rhubarb"? On the train last Saturday for London and the Forward in Faith meeting, perforce I had to hear the extraordinary chatter of a group of young women. Rendering them on stage would be a matter, I reflected, of "like like like" ("I'm like on the train ...", confided one of them into her mobile). My senior churchwarden, the lexicographer, tells me that "like" is called a "filler" and is of North American origin, coming probably from somewhere called "California". Oxford is full of North American girls whose fathers appear to see Oxford as a sort of finishing school. Not that I have anything against North Americans; a former colleague and friend, educated at Harvard, Tuebingen, and Wadham (at least two of which are reputable academic institutions), was an American, as is a current friend, an academic who is as at home with the denizens of the Tudor court as if he had been chatting with them all yesterday. But neither of them says "like" at all. Neither would the bimbos if they had been properly educated through the means of Latin Prose Composition. Which reminds me: I noticed on my computer the other day a course for teaching yourself liturgical Latin. It is called Simplicissimus, is sponsored by the Latin Mass Society, and looks a very good way of getting fast into exactly what you need for saying (parts at least of) the Mass and the Office in Latin. Talking about which: the Westminster Cathedral Bookshop and the nearby CTS bookshop have both acquired new stocks of the Liturgia Horarum in Latin; an update of the Second Typical Edition with, as far as I could see, none of the innumerable misprints removed. Ah, and by the way, there appeared to be significant disparities of price between the two shops. OOOh yes and did you see that bit in the papers about how discursiveness and forgetfulness are among the earliest signs of Dementia? Now, how did I mean to end this post ...