Tuesday, January 26, 2021 Reading Roundup

What would you do if someone called you a “trull?” Or a “quean?” Worse yet, a “mandrake root?”

I’ve been reading Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis. The story is narrated by Orual, the king’s oldest daughter. She tells of a time when he exploded with anger at her thusly:

“You!” He shouted. “You! You to raise your voice among the counsels of men? You trull, you quean, you mandrake root!”

Well, of all the nerve! If you’re like me and have no idea what any of those things mean, here’s the breakdown:

Trull: a prostitute
Quean: an impudent or ill-behaved girl or woman
Mandrake root: supposedly resembles the human form, allegedly shrieks when pulled from the ground.

Nice guy. Definitely not getting the “Father of the Year” award.

I wouldn’t recommend adopting those terms to use when you’re angry at someone, but it’s a useful tidbit to tuck away just in case those words get volleyed at you.

And here’s what Anthony Esolen wrote in the book Out of the Ashes, championing the role of the mother:

“Even the phrase ‘stay-at-home mom’ is patronizing and faintly derogatory, like ‘stick-in-the-mud mom’ or ‘sit-in-the-corner mom.’ Do we talk about a ‘chained-to-the-desk mom’ or a ‘stuck-in-traffic mom’ or a ‘languishing-in-meetings mom’? To do fifty things in one day for which you alone are responsible, for the immediate good of the people you love, is deemed easy, trivial, beneath the dignity of a rational person…

Chesterton put it well when he said that the work of a mother is not small, but vast. A teacher would bring to fifty children the arithmetical rule of three, and though that is an interesting thing, it is but small and limited. The mother brings to one child the whole universe. That is no sentimentality. It is exactly true.”

I love that: “The mother brings to one child the universe.”

Yes!

May the wind chimes in your life melt all the coldness in your bones.

I’ll probably delete this in the morning since it contains words like “trull” and “quean.”