Gentle on my mind.

 Gent(i)le (is still) on my mind. 

continued from here

“But,” Axel said and stopped.

     “But what?” I said.

“So, you’re the only one I know - maybe the only one I’ve ever known - who owns both the OED and the DM-IV.”

     “I didn’t buy them,” I said because a lot of people think I am prodigal, and I am not. Axel didn’t say anything. Then, when I didn’t say anything more either, he said,

     “Okay.” He paused, a purple pause. Then, he said, “Could you look something up for me?”

     “I guess so,” I said. Then that seemed ungracious, so I went on, “What?”

     “This is the ‘but,’” he said. “Did ‘gentle’ mean what we mean by ‘gentle’ in 1600?”

     “Okay,” I said.

     “Do you see what I mean?”

     “Maybe,” I said.

     “I mean that maybe it wasn’t an option for translators then. The King James uses ‘meek’ for both ‘Blessed are the meek” and in Jesus’ saying, ‘I am the meek and lowly in heart.’ ‘Gentle’ may not have meant ‘mild’ or ‘tender’ or ‘kind’ then; it may have meant still only ‘noble’ or ‘high-born.’”

     “Okay,” I said.

     “You see now, right?” Axel said.

     “Yes.”

     “Call me back.”

     “Yes, if I can find anything out,” I said.

     “Sure, you can.” I know he was thinking, “It’s just a matter of looking it up.”

We were both still on the line.

     “Get Fredo to help,” Axel broke the silence.

     “What?”

     “Isn’t he visiting?”

     “How did you know?” I said.

     “Albert told Nils,” Axel said.

Alfredo is the son of Dominga the paramour of Bart the son of Roz - the pocket Junot Diaz, eleven years old (just!). But when I tell him why we’re looking up “gentle,” he gets it, right away. He understands how the OED works. There’s one in the library on Broadway north of Dyckman, where he goes. “You know,” he says. “You took me there once.” “I think you took me there,” I say. “Yeah, right. Probably right,” he says.

     “So this is what we do, so we can read it easily,” he tells me (because I own The Compact Edition). “We scan the page; then we blow it up, the image . . . .” And he shows me how to make it sharper, too. “Then we can read it on the computer.” He sees me gaping at it.

     “Maybe we print it out for you,” he says. So, we do that.

It’s not so smooth an operation as I’ve implied. Volume I (A-O)* is 9” x 12½” x 3” and weighs 8 lbs. I hoist it onto the flatbed of the scanner and then hold it so the page is square and as flat as it can be while Alfredo runs the scanner from the pc.

“In any case, here is what we found,” I am now telling Axel. That: The first definition, as he suspected, is “well-born, belonging to a family of position,” a synonym for noble. Though it comes by 1500 to mean “honourable” more generally. Maybe even before then - there’s an example from before 1400 - it can mean “courteous, polite”; but the example refers to an action, not a person, someone speaking a “gentil word” or a woman making a man “gentil cher.”

     Before KJV “gentle” can refer to an animal, as quiet, easily managed as opposed to wild. It can refer cloth, as soft, supple, pliant as opposed to rough and scratchy. There is gentle weather; there are gentle rivers and gentle sounds. Medicine can act gently as opposed to violently. And, yes, persons can be “mild in disposition . . . kind; tender,” though there’s no example of that before the 1550s and it’s not common usage, it doesn’t look like before the 19th century.

     What Axel found: There isn’t much gentleness in it (the KJV), two parallel passages in the Old Testament (2 Samuel 22:36 and in Palm 118), two in Paul, two in the pastorals, and one in James. “‘Don’t be brawlers,’ Titus says, ‘be gentle instead.’ Meaning, I take it from Timothy and James, ‘patient,’ ‘peaceable,’ ‘easy.’”

“I like that,” I said. “Blessed be the easy . . . .”

     “I’d like that, too,” Axel said. “But . . .” and I heard rustling. “ ‘Easy’ is actually obedient (eu0peiqh&j) - the phrase is ‘easy to be intreated’ - and, dammit, ‘gentle’ isn’t prau5j but e0peikh&j.”

     “Yes, ‘dammit,’” I said.

“So, we can’t rewrite history,” I said.

     “Not this time,” Axel said.

     “The words won’t let us,” I said.

     “No. Sadly, they won’t.”

     “Unless. Maybe we missed something,” I said.

     “I’m sure we did,” Axel said, but he didn’t sound encouraged.

08.06.20

_______________

 * The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (“complete text reproduced micrographically”), 1971.