5 minute read
Traces remain
Joseph Shaw explains how Catholic Linguistic Survivals from the Ancient Liturgy are embedded in the fabric of our lives
We live in a country with vestiges of Catholic life and culture all around us. Some of these are massive and unmissable, like the ruins of the great Yorkshire monasteries. Others are harder to discern, like the single remaining archway of the once important Osney Abbey, now in Oxford Marina.
Traces also remain in language. The term used in medicine, placebo, refers to a treatment with no innate power to heal, but which has a psychological effect, the so-called ‘ placebo effect’. Anyone with a touch of Latin will know that ‘placebo’ is the Latin for ‘I will please’, which seems to have something to do with the matter in hand, but in a somewhat oblique way. Why is it in the future tense?
The appropriateness of calling a pleasing medical treatment a ‘placebo’ must have helped the word to stick, but the origin is actually liturgical. As the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology explains, it is the first word of the first antiphon of Vespers for the Dead: Placebo Domino in regione vivorum, ‘I will please the Lord in the regions of the living’. This is itself a quotation from the Gallican Psalter, the ancient Latin psalter used in the Traditional Office, Ps 114:9.
What my Dictionary cannot explain, however, is how the opening word of this antiphon has acquired its current meaning. The answer is that the practice of saying or singing the Vespers of the Dead became established as a way of honouring the deceased, and by extension their living relatives.
One could, in fact, curry favour with an important person by singing ‘Placebo’ in favour of a deceased parent of theirs, for example. This gives an oddly appropriate secondary meaning to the idea of pleasing people in the land of the living.
Even more obscure is the phrase ‘pony up’, with reference to money, although this has more currency (if readers will excuse the pun), in the United States than in England. I first encountered the phrase reading an Thomas Tusser: playful article in The Economist, which employs a rather whimsical vocabulary, about dubious websites, saying that some viewers of these will, in the end, ‘pony up a credit card number’.
Thomas Tusser: playful
The idea of carrying money, let alone credit cards, in the saddlebags of a small horse, or perhaps a string of them, has a certain delicious absurdity about it in the modern context. But four-legged ponies do not, in fact, appear to have anything to do with the origin of the phrase.
The Dictionary of Etymology is of no assistance here, but if we take ‘pony’ as ‘pone’, it turns into a Latin imperative: to put, or place. This seems appropriate, and suggests an origin in legal Latin. However, the truth is more complicated. The late Fr Mark Elvins, in his book Catholic Trivia (1992 and 2002), provides a quotation from a verse book, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (that is, housekeeping) first published in 1557, by a certain Thomas Tusser, which provides a link to something else. Tusser advises us in his twenty-ninth ‘point’. I give the whole stanza:
Here the reference is to ‘ready money’, as opposed to relying on credit: this is what ‘pony up’ continues to mean, so the connection is convincing. ‘Legem pone’, however, doesn’t mean ‘put down money’ or anything like that. The words are found twice in the Gallican Psalter, 26:11 and 118:33. The imperative is addressed to the Lord, who is to show or teach or set out the law for the benefit of the speaker.
Perhaps, then, as is the case with Placebo, we need to consider the place of this phrase in the Office. Fr Elvins suggests that psalm 118 (119 in the modern numbering), beginning with these words, was sung on the ‘quarter days’, when traditionally rents are due in England: 25 March (Lady Day: the Annunciation), 25 June, 25 September, and 25 December.
Fr Elvins’ explanation seems, at best, to be simplified to the point of falsity. The Office divides up the psalms by the day of the week, not the day of the month, and ‘Legem pone mihi, Domine, in via tua,’ is not the opening line of Psalm 118, but verse 33.
Psalm 118 is, in fact, a psalm of special significance. It is extremely long, running to 176 verses, and expresses the singer’s zeal for uprightness, with reference also to the sufferings this entails, and to the enemies of God. Its great importance is reflected in the fact that, while the Office covers every psalm in the course of a week, Psalm 118 is traditionally sung every day. Because of its length, it is, however, divided up between the Little Hours: Prime, Terce, Sext, and None, which indeed include little else. Our verse, 33, is the first verse of the psalmody of the Office of Terce, the mid-morning Office which precedes the celebration of Mass (except in Lent, when None comes before Mass).
This arrangement of the Psalms is that of the Office of Pope Pius V and many earlier versions; in 1911 Pope Pius X’s rearranged Office confines Psalm 118 to Sundays, removing any connection with the transaction of financial business. My guess would be that, at least until 1911, a man who paid his debts at the singing of ‘Legem pone’, at the beginning of Terce, on the day debts were due, was a man who kept on top of his affairs.
The rest of Tusser’s stanza seems to me more playful. At the end of the Office of Terce there is, naturally, be a collect, introduced by ‘Oremus’, ‘Let us pray’. This suggests a debtor begging for more time. Even worse is to come: ‘Praesta, quaesumus’ is a very common element in collects, meaning ‘Grant, we beseech thee’: spoken ‘out of a grate’, by a debtor now behind bars imploring mercy, it is far from what the lender wishes to hear.
It would appear that Tusser, living and writing at the very moment of the disappearance of the Latin Office from mainstream English life, has with his popular book of aphorisms managed to preserve in the English language a phrase based on a rather obscure aspect of the Old Religion.
I am sure the Latin Mass Society’s Treasurer will agree, at any rate, with the content of Tusser’s advice, and urge members to ‘pony up’ their subscriptions directly they are due! We may not be aware of it, but commonly used terms used in English often have their origins in Liturgical Latin
We may not be aware of it, but commonly used terms used in English often have their origins in Liturgical Latin
