(help me our here, Dennis--are these two words as related as they seem? Help thou us, O Etymology Man!!!
(In the case of the Detroit Lions, it certainly seems there is some relation!) Alas poor Bills ye knew them well...
The great mass of ratio ad absurdum makes life a mess of noi/sty des-aspirations?
"Ah, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field that the Lord has blessed."
"But who are you?" Ike trembled violently.
I am slogging through Tolstoy's agrarianism, which reminds me of the Southern author-cluster contemporaneous or slightly prior to O'Connor... I believe Alan Tate may have been their chief contributor...a contemporary example might be Wendell Berry, who also harkens back to the virtues of farming and farmland and small town life. Percy has such a character in the mother in his book, "The Moviegoer." I seem to recall her as a follower of Marcus Aurelius or some other noble pagan. I have heard something similar about Tom Wolfe's magnum opus, involving the cult of Zeus--?--
All of them seem to give the nod to religion as being important but only as a social construct or kind of moral adhesive that has no basis in fact but is useful to restrain the unlearned masses.
Tolstoy doesn't seem to think the ex-serfs are even educable, or that education is even worth the candle--except that he has already gotten his, thank you very much. O'Connor may have been very much at home in the country--she hated Atlanta--but she was no starry eyed idealist or romantic. This is why Mr. Tate has decreased and she has increased, even in the South itself. Urbanists loved her portrayals of "Good Country People" but as it turns our they have in the main been tone deaf or dyslexic towards the plain grace in fromt of their faces. It is unthinkable to both the urbanist and to the noble agrarian that such people should be given a second look; and the only reason they fall into the trap of judgementalism, and miss the point of the grotesqueries, is that their imaginations pretty much halt within the confines of their own romantic ambitions--once again I refer to Christian Landers' satires about, "the wrong sort of white people." which of course is a dig against the "right sort of white people" of which he is admitedly a member.
And to O'Connor's assertions that one must "draw large and startling figures" to an audience such as hers--and in the main, they still don't get it--one must draw attention to not so much her style as her substance. The brief reviews I have read of O'Connor's work are so off the beam--as we see in her letters--that one really needn't bother. If one totally disregards The Holy Ghost, as most of us do most of the time--damned inconvenient, He Is--there is simply no way to come to an understanding of what she was doing--she knew all that and kept writing--ahead of and outside the bell curve--"anyways."
O'Connor never seemed to me the least bit sanguine about either urban life nor about the serfs and Serf-dome of the deep South. Yet she participated-albeit reluctantly and not wholeheartedly-- in both--as a writer and an intellect--but never championed much of anything disembodied or anti-carnate. She read widely and deeply but was never arrested or taken in my mere philosophy...she lagged behind--purposely I think--postmodernism--but was in the end proven far ahead of that curve as well--in a way that Berry and Tate will never be. Both Tate and Berry are very much a captive of their times--which is why they could get articles and poems in The New Yorker, which never published so much as one Percy or O'Connor story. The died- in- the- wool urban romantic or powerful pragmatists who buy the golden junk that fills the margins of TNY, really doesn't intend to kill his/her goose.
Actually there is a connection between the two words.
ReplyDeleteWord History: The word naughty at one time was an all-purpose word similar to bad. During the 16th century one could use naughty to mean "unhealthy, unpleasant, bad (with respect to weather), vicious (of an animal), inferior, or bad in quality" (one could say "very naughtie figes" or "naughty corrupt water"). All of these senses have disappeared, however, and naughty is now used mainly in contexts involving mischief or indecency. This recalls its early days in Middle English (with the form noughti), when the word was restricted to the senses "evil, hostile, ineffectual, and needy." Middle English noughti, first recorded in the last quarter of the 14th century, was derived from nought, which primarily meant "nothing" but was also used as a noun meaning "evil" and as an adjective meaning such things as "immoral, weak, useless." Thus naughty, in a sense, has risen from nothing, but its fortunes used to be better than they are at present.