Magni Formica Laboris

The great virtue of literature (of art in general) is that it does not truck with abstract data, such as the dates of battles or elections, the numbers of this or that, or the rules or laws of this or that. One could argue that such “data” are rarely real for us, in any experiential sense, and that the business of art is precisely to translate data and information into living circumstance, to turn fact into fiction. It may seem that such a procedure moves away from reality, but the opposite is true. Facts start to live when we see them as part of experience, even fictive experience. - Arnold Weinstein, in his guidebook to Classics of American Literature

By Jennifer Franklin

I was reading this article which contained the following interesting historical tidbit about the different words that survived in modern English: Then there are doublets, less dramatic than triplets but fun nevertheless, such as the English/French pairs  begin / commence  and  want / desire . Especially noteworthy here are the culinary transformations: We kill a  cow or a  pig  (English) to yield  beef  or  pork  (French). Why? Well, generally in Norman England, English-speaking laborers did the slaughtering for moneyed French speakers at the table. The different ways of referring to meat depended on one's place in the scheme of things, and those class distinctions have carried down to us in discreet form today. This is a great example of the consistency theory of knowledge (see Lehrer text).