Phrontistery

How vainly men themselves amaze adding bits on to their houses - a games room, a gym, a private cinema. If I ever have the money, I shall build myself a phrontistery, or possibly a phrontisterion, they mean the same thing: a place for thinking.

In such a room the eager phrontist could meditate, cogitate and ponder. This would continue until I got into a bad mood, at which point I would go to the boudoir and sulk.

As Andrew Marvell said of his garden:

Fair Quiet, have I found thee here,
And Innocence, thy sister dear!
Mistaken long, I sought you then
In busy companies of men :
Your sacred plants, if here below,
Only among the plants will grow ;
Society is all but rude,
To this delicious solitude.

The Phrontisterion of Trapezous

Ballots and Balls

Ballot comes from the Venetian word ballotte, which means small balls. Indeed, the term arrived on English shores inside The Historie of Italie by William Thomas. The idea was that you could cast votes by placing different coloured balls (or pebbles) into a bag.

This idea leads back to ancient Athens. If the Athenians wanted to banish somebody for not being classical enough, they would vote on the question by putting little black or white fragments of pottery in a box. White meant yes: black no. These tiles were called ostrakons. Hence ostracism. Ostracism has nothing to do with ostriches but is distantly related to oysters (both words relate to bone).

The first verbing of ostracism was in this apt couplet by Andrew Marvell:

Therefore the democratic stars did rise,
And all that worth from hence did ostracize.

The method and term survives to this day in blackballing. In the gentlemen's clubs of London an application for membership may be refused on the basis of a single black ball in the ballot box.

In ancient Syracuse votes for banishment did not use shards of pottery. They used olive leaves and so ostracism was called petalismos, which is far more beautiful.

A brown ballot box containing balls, darling.

Thou and You

Here's some lovely poetry courtesy of Andrew Marvell. Notice the words in bold.

Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, Lady, were no crime

We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long love's day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges' side
Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.

Once upon a time English was nice and simple. There was the second person singular thou and the second person plural you. Then in 1066 everything went wrong. The Normans arrived bringing with them the royal plural. "We are not amused," said Queen Victoria. "We are Henry the Eighth, we are," said Henry the Eighth. This pluralisation of royals was not simply I becoming we, they also had to be addressed as though they were plural. So the top of society started to demand that they were addressed plurally as you.
 
This spread. You became a simple reverential form. Through the sixteenth century it got more and more complicated. People would call others you in the way that junk mail tends to add an esquire to my name. You was everywhere. Thou was familar or condescending. You used it to your servants.
 
So what do you call the girl you love? What do you say when you are trying to be familiar with the queen of your heart. Do you wish for worship or intimacy? Can you be intimate with your deity? Does it depend whether, like Marvell, you're in Hull or London?
 
None of these questions bothered William Tyndale as he sat down in the early sixteenth century to translate the Bible. Not for him the shallow flirtations and flattery of society, nor the intricacies of adoration: he wanted accuracy.

Now, Greek (in which the Gospels are written) has a second person singular and a second person plural. So he translated the singular as thou and the plural as you. That is why God is thou: not because He is your friend (He isn't, He thinks you're bad), but because God is singular. Jesus thous (it can be a verb like tutoyer) individuals and yous crowds.

And here is an oddity, here is a bit of the screenplay for scene 57 of that delicate, lyrical work The Return of the Jedi:

Darth Vader, standing with other members of the Imperial council, cautiously approaches his master. The ruler's back is to Vader. After several tense moments, the Emperor's chair rotates around to face him.

VADER What is thy bidding, my Master?

Thou was the singular, then it was the familiar, then it was the condescending, then it was left only in the Bible often used to address God, and thus thou became reverential again.

Well I say that thou has survived only in the Bible. I believe that there are still a couple of people in Yorkshire who thou each other (I'll believe anything about Yorkshire). A popular beat combo from Leeds called (slightly tautologically) the Kaiser Chiefs recorded a song alarmingly titled I Predict A Riot with the lines:

Watching the people get lairy
It's not very pretty I tell thee
Walking through town is quite scary
It's not very sensible either

Which is thou's proof of life, or at least life Yorkshire.

To return for a second to Andrew Marvell, he was MP for Hull (hence the reference to the "Tide of Humber") and wrote beautiful poetry. William Wilberforce was also MP for Hull and was instrumental in stopping the slave trade. So who, dear reader, who could fill this great post now? What poetic, liberating hero could don so holy a mantle?

John Prescott