to curry favour: "flatter, seek favour by officious show of courtesy or kindness"

Through the miracle of association, which can lead you all sorts of places, I got to thinking about this rather wonderful and strange expression in English: to curry favour. I found, remarkably, that it has nothing to do with either Indian spices, or 'favour'. 

It all began while reading Les Trois Mousquetaires, when I recently came across some colourful verbs like 'ferrailler' and "étriller un cheval". Not knowing much about things equestrian, I wanted to find out the English for "étriller", which is (specialists might correct me) 'to curry', or 'to currycomb' a horse. This led in turn to wondering what brushing down a horse had to do with one of my favourite dishes, so I began an investigation into 'curry', and this is what I found in Skeat's exciting (no irony intended) etymological dictionary:

The Culture of Modernity - Charles Taylor (HK/KH)

In a much earlier post, I put up a chapter from the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor's excellent work, Sources of the Self. I have chosen another chapter to put on line for you, which I think is particularly interesting and useful, from a literary point of view. It comes in the middle of a long enquiry into the evolution of a sense of self, from the Middle Ages to this point in his study: the eighteenth century. So it might not be fully understandable at the outset. Be patient, it is a good read! And Taylor has the virtue of being clear and intellectually integral.

His approach here is quite literary, because he refers to the growing trend and development of the novel at this time, particularly in Britain, but with references to France, for example Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse. He mentions Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), two epistolary novels (a fashionable form at the time) by Samuel Richardson, and of course Daniel Defoe's works, which all embodied the new sense of importance given to 'sentiment', and the moral value of 'noble and good' sentiment within the context of relationship, especially marriage. It was also the time in which greater validity was given to childhood, as a distinct period in life. We can see future elements of Romanticism in embryonic form.

Upmost in this thinking is the growth of the private sphere, along with the importance given to 'the ordinary life', all of which we now take for granted. He articulates this as a major shift from 'archetypal' vision to the subject being the locus of meaning, particularly in its quality of instrumental, reasoning subject. The new understanding replaces the traditional cosmology based on hierarchy. Whereas before (and we can see this in Shakespeare) Nature corresponded to and found an echo in human being through a cosmology structured around hierarchies which could be disrupted, now what counts is the effect Nature has on us, the locus of feeling, and the way it reflects our feelings, our mood. This developed over a long period, and the novel, with its attention to the detail of ordinary life, expressed and reinforced this.

You will find the chapter by clicking on the link below:

Owen Barfield on poetic language (Kh/HK)

Here are some interesting thoughts by Owen Barfield, friend of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and one of the Inklings. This chapter, ‘Language and Poetry’, comes from his major, highly influential work Poetic Diction: A Study of Meaning.

Barfield here considers the stages through which poetry and poetic vision have passed, and the accompanying changes in language and thought. He begins, in a necessarily simplistic way, with the ‘concrete vocabulary’ of the world’s first mythologies, to Greek mythology as vector of meaning alongside living Nature, to the language of modernity. 

Particularly interesting are his remarks on the ancient Greek language of Homer being ‘looser’ than our more usual ‘architectural’ linguistic and poetic forms: ‘a living, muscular organism rather than as a structure...’. This move from an ‘organic’, ‘fluid’ type of poetry to the ‘architectural’ he places more or less in English from the seventeenth century onwards, for instance in Milton and the Metaphysicals, not so much in Chaucer or Shakespeare. The more ‘fluid’ types of verse are made for reciting, the more ‘architectural’, for reading, for seeing on the page.

He draws out the inherent tension between the ‘rational’ and the ‘poetic’ in the history of poetic utterance; the ‘rational, abstracting, formal principle’ and the ‘primal flow of meaning’. It is surely in a great poet like Shakespeare that we find the perfect balance; the great intelligence of an organising principle working with the ‘flow’ of life.

Compare the extracts of Shakespeare we have studied with Milton or John Donne, for example. The seventeenth century really is a watershed. Think of Milton's highly elaborate poetic architecture, the latinate syntax. I think in the twentieth century T. S. Eliot gave much thought to this, and brought back in a modern way the organic forms of poetic utterance in the context of Modernism.

Click here to download the chapter in pdf format: