disjoin

[learnedax]

ted thoughts

some really good fighting tonight, though driving stick afterwards was slightly less fun with a throbbing biceps

i must be reading too much warren ellis and garth ennis when something like dv8 seems merely quirky

if e. e. cummings lived in a world of html markup what sort of art would he create? would it look like todd klein?

reading the sheriff of nottingham, wherein a character muses that perhaps, like gaul, all men are divided in three parts. one which fights, one which works, and one which prays. i can't find any sources that interpret caesar to mean that, but it's a notion surprisingly like the minbari

lyevsha and i were talking about waveland again this evening. it was such a surreal perspective changing thing. i need to do more of that

Comments

[new-man.livejournal.com]

The concept of the three estates is attributed to Alfred the Great, who was a pretty smart guy, but he was unlikely to put "those who pray" on equal footing with those who fight or those who work the land. The reference appears in Asser's Chronicle of Alfred's life. Asser was one of those who pray. The rest is left as an excercise for the reader.

BTW, the term "estates" isn't popularly applied to the different classes of society until the French Revolution, well out of period.

[jdulac.livejournal.com]

BTW, the term "estates" isn't popularly applied to the different classes of society until the French Revolution, well out of period.

well, it is in texts that I read of the 16th c. The French kings had been calling the Estates General (a meeting of representatives of the various estates) for some time.

[new-man.livejournal.com]

Yah -- I'm not saying it didn't exist, just that it wasn't in common usage. I think what actually brought it to the forefront was the coining of the term "fourth estate" (for journalism) and that didn't happen (allegedly) until Thomas Carlyle quoted Edmund Burke in the mid-19th century. Like so many ood quotes lain at Burke's feet, it's unclear whther he actually coined the phrase "fourth estate" to mean journalists, or whether it's just attributed to him.