[lit-ideas] Re: Mitfordiana
- From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 15 Feb 2015 16:38:45 -0500
My last post today!
Geary: "If you were in Memphis and you said "I feel like some Rendezvous?"
Everyone would know that you were saying: "Let's go to the Rendezvous
Restaurant and eat the best damn barbecued ribs in the whole damn world.""
In a message dated 2/15/2015 4:10:02 P.M. Eastern Standard Time,
omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx objects:
"Presumably as long as you were in Memphis, Tennessee, and not visiting a
historical site near Cairo."
This brings us back to Palma's apt observation:
"Padua university is called Padua University exactly because both Padua
city and Padua University exist and Padua city got there way before the
university and its faculties came into being."
By the same token, it might be argued that the historical site near Cairo
referred to by Omar 'got there' "way before" what some refer to as "New
Memphis".
New Memphis was founded by the trio John Overton, James Winchester, and
Andrew Jackson and named after Old Memphis, the old capital of Egypt on the
Nile. The founders, who were amateur egyptologists, planned for a large city
to be built on the site and went to on lay out a plan featuring a regular
grid of streets interrupted by four town squares, to be named (i) Exchange,
(ii) Market, (iii) Court, and (iv) Auction, which they found were lacking
in Old Memphis.
>If you were in [New] Memphis and said, 'I feel like some Rendezvous?'
equivocates on 'say'. Capital "R" in "Rendezvous" cannot literally be said.
In Old Memphis, as Omar notes, the utterance may invite the implicature
that you feel like meeting someone in the ancient capital of Egypt.
Unless you are a Frenchman, for a Frenchman cannot use 'rendezvous' without
thinking 'vous' which kills the implicature -- since it would literally
indicate that the utterer is wanting to meet the addressee ('vous') which he
already has.
As Flanagan and Allen write in "Inky Dinky Parley-Vous", "the phrase
"rendez vous" is imperative in meaning -- and should be best translated as
"Present yourselves!", as used in the military, e.g. by a sargeant assembling
the troops -- hence plural 'vous'. Due to the Norman Conquest, it became
habitually, circa 1590, to use the phrase to refer, in England, never in
France,
to any appointed place of meeting, not necessary military."
Cheers,
Speranza
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
