I thought, as you do, of using some apposite quotation from the Parable of the Prodigal Son, or that bit in Matthew of “rejoice, and be exceeding glad” to express my delight at being presented with my Lost White Notebook (the capital letters indicating the growing importance that I have placed on it while it was lost) to accompany my post swim cup of tea. I had obviously left the book or dropped the book at or near my seat and it had been found and carefully put away by the catering staff. “Great happiness!” Though that is not the King James Version of the Bible, but rather King Duncan in Macbeth, and his joy has to be viewed with a certain degree of irony!
And that is always the problem with quotations, or perhaps it is their delight – that they come with associations. You detach them from their contexts at your peril.
The Parable of the Prodigal Son ends with the father telling his disgruntled elder son, that his younger impoverished, wastrel brother, “was lost, and is found.” Simple, precise, and beautiful. Applying the ‘mere’ words to my lost notebook may be accurate, but a book of my scribbles being kept behind the counter in the swimming pool café, waiting for me to reclaim it, is hardly the stuff of moral instruction, and the spiritual baggage of the quotation overwhelms the occasion.
Similarly, with the ‘bit’ of Matthew. The words are spoken just after Jesus has delivered the Beatitudes and he encourages his disciples and followers to accept the persecution that will follow acceptance of his doctrine as a sign of their being blessed. Not just popping a small notebook back in the pocket that it must have fallen out of.
At one time an ‘educated’ person would have been able to use images and language from the Bible and the Classics and have a reasonable expectation that his ‘educated’ listener would be able to follow his examples.
Today, what is our generally shared pool of knowledge? I would suggest that even with a parable as famous as The Prodigal Son, and even with the phrase being part of reasonably everyday English, few know any details of the story, or even that it comes from the Bible.
When I was teaching and trying to justify (is that the right word) Milton’s use of heavy religious and Classical imagery, I would ask the class to think of a simile, to make one up, but to use a figure or event or product that they knew well, with the aim to get the simile accepted by the whole class. So, for example, you could say, “Complete the following simile, ‘As famous as ………..’ filling in the space with the name of a person, a living person, whom everybody in the class would know.” The students usually forgot that I was in the class too, and their favourite and very famous singers or football players or television stars, did not sometimes figure on my list of the famous, which the kids used to call ‘foul’ to and say that to get someone even I must know would be impossible! Which was part of the point that I was making.
It was a useful exercise to show that there were various spheres of “You must have heard of him/her” where not knowing the “famous” person by a section of the class was greeted with astonishment.
I also used the expression, “As faithful as Ruth.” Not only had most of the classes never heard of the expression, they also did not know that there was a book of the bible called Ruth and they knew nothing about the story of Ruth, Naomi, and Boaz.
Of course, you could say that my generation of baby boomers was the last to be brought up on a diet of significant and generally accepted Great Literature, with poems from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury featuring heavily. In my first year in Secondary School, we read from a slim volume called Men and Gods which gave brief and readable versions of some of the more famous Greek and Roman myths, giving us a fairly easy was in to hearing some of the Classical names that would feature in the literature that we would be presented with as we progressed through school.
The odious Johnson peppers his discourse with references to the Classics, throwing a few well-worn Latin tags into his so-called conversation to give the impression of timeless erudition. But he hides behind the effect, he does not use Classicism to elucidate but rather to intimidate. He aims for the same admiration that right-wing thugs gave to Enoch Powell,
when they vaunted his linguistic ability and his ability to read Latin and Greek as a way of giving themselves some reflected kudos from his academic reputation and using his assumed intellectual superiority to justify their base behaviour.
A shared body of knowledge is only useful if it makes communication easier, otherwise it becomes a way of excluding and reinforces exclusivity.
So, what about the expression of my glee at finding something that was lost? Famous quotations come ‘ready-made’, but they come with associations that are rarely exactly to the point that you are trying to make.
The only solution, of course, is to write your own!
