Apparently English notch arises from a word-division error due to the English movable n: it wasn’t originally a notch, it was an otch (cf. French oche “a notch”). So says the AHD and the tyrant OED.
This is analogous to English adder which was originally nadder (from OE nǣdre “snake”), but people misheard a nadder as an adder.
This movable n in English might be more trouble than it’s worth, but it’s probably too late to put a stop to it.
I misread a student’s handwriting and thought they had written “Prester Joan” (instead of “Prester John”). Now I can’t stop thinking of Prester Joan teaming up with Pope Joan to, I don’t know, conquer the moon or something.
Title pages for some Sabre Press chapbooks (circa 2020); unfortunately I wasn’t able to track down any more info online about the edition or the artist.
[edited to add]
Ariosto calls Prester John Senapo, from senape “the mustard plant”. So this character in Orlando Furioso comes with his own soundtrack, although I expect most of my students are too young to hear it.
Thank God. This has been a rough semester (for personal more than academic reasons: my pancreas trying to kill me in January and Lennie’s death in April).
Of these innocent victims of tyranny, none died more lamented than the two brothers of the Quintilian family, Maximus and Condianus; whose fraternal love has saved their names from oblivion, and endeared their memory to posterity. Their studies and their occupations, their pursuits and their pleasures, were still the same. In the enjoyment of a great estate, they never admitted the idea of a separate interest: some fragments are now extant of a treatise which they composed in common; and in every action of life it was observed that their two bodies were animated by one soul. The Antonines, who valued their virtues, and delighted in their union, raised them, in the same year, to the consulship; and Marcus afterwards intrusted to their joint care the civil administration of Greece, and a great military command, in which they obtained a signal victory over the Germans. The kind cruelty of Commodus united them in death.
—Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. 4
The winery dates from the period of imperial ownership, and the article has some nice images of the excavations and the production of wine in the ancient world.
DARVO describes a defense strategy that abusers use to evade responsibility for their actions. The acronym was coined by Dr. Jennifer Freyd, and stands for “Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender”.
The perpetrator or offender may Deny the behavior, Attack the individual doing the confronting, and Reverse the roles of Victim and Offender such that the perpetrator assumes the victim role and turns the true victim — or the whistle blower — into an alleged offender. This occurs, for instance, when an actually guilty perpetrator assumes the role of “falsely accused” and attacks the accuser’s credibility and blames the accuser of being the perpetrator of a false accusation.
This is a powerful formulation, not because if refers to some exotic behavioral phenomenon on the fringe of human experience, but because we can all recognize it from stuff we’ve seen or heard about. People reading the description tend to think, “Sure, that reminds me of X”—some abuser that they knew or have heard about. It’s the strategy Cicero used in defending Caelius Rufus against the charge of attempted murder of his ex. It’s often used because it often works.
In the Vallow-Daybell case, Vallow’s estranged husband tried to alert authorities to crimes in progress, but Vallow used DARVO to convince the police that it was her husband who was the problem. Now that Vallow’s husband, Vallow’s children, and Daybell’s wife have been murdered in separate incidents, it’s clearer who the offenders and who the victims are, but some of those victims might still be around if the cops hadn’t succumbed to DARVO, with or without Fresca.
Still from Play It Again, Sam (1972) stolen from Clip Cafe, who doesn’t own it anyway. (Decades later, Allen would be offering people DARVO without Fresca, but that’s another story.)
I just got the Hofstadter volume from the Library of America and I’ve been enjoying/suffering through a reread of “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”.
“Enjoying” because Hofstadter is a knowledgeable and deeply insightful writer with a dryly witty style; “suffering through” because the fringe movements he was writing about in the early 60s are the right-wing mainstream of today and it’s sickening to think how widely this dementia has spread through the body politic.
But it does help to explain why some people internalize any mental poison that someone like Trump or Margery Taylor Green pours in their ears. They have a place already prepared for it there, a long habit of paranoid thinking that takes on different details, depending on what is politically fashionable, but is always the same in form and effect: the nation/way of life/race is under attack by shadowy and nefarious forces, which justifies any action to defend it. The menace may change (Communists, black people, Jews, drag queens, immigrants, etc.), but there is always a menace and you are always being urged to war against it.
And you can’t make peace with Nefarious Forces Unnamed. You cannot compromise with Nefarious Forces Unnamed. Which means you can’t coexist with Nefarious Forces Unnamed, and the very existence of a pluralistic government becomes intolerable.
And so here we are. It would be nice to know where we can go from here, but Hofstadter doesn’t provide any clue for that (at least not in this essay).
