Medieval teeheehee and ick-factor?

When it's time to waste time, I fall back on the ol' favorite of reading up on archaic languages. This time it was La Vie de St. Léger, written about 980 AD and considered the third-oldest document in Old French (the only earlier ones are the Sequence of Saint Eulalia (c. 880 AD) and the famous Strasbourg Oaths, said to have been uttered in 842 AD at a meeting between two grandsons of Charlemagne, each speaking in the other's language, Old French vs. Old High German).

All well and dandy but then I went to check out this guy Léger, actually named Leodegar, and the first thing I see on Wikipedia is a horrid picture of a guy having his eyes bored out with a hand drill! This is evidently how the medieval monks saw fit to illustrate the story of Léger in a French Bible of 1200 AD or so. (Now how this guy's story made it into that bible, I have no idea: He lived in the 600's AD, and the actual Bible had long since been written.)

Now's it true that even to this day in Catholic churches there are images all over the place of a guy being nailed to a cross, often with blood prominently spurting from the hand and foot holes. I suppose I've seen this image so often (even though I'm hardly Catholic) that I've become inured to its true goriness.

But still ... other than "grandfathered-in" images like Christ on the cross, could you imagine anyone wanting to illustrate any legislatures, libraries, bridges, constitutions, Academy award ceremonies or other monuments to modern high culture in this fashion? In today's world, explicit sex and violence is practically synonymous with lowbrow, camp culture (horror movies, pornography, video games, etc.). Anywhere worthy of veneration needs a sanitized, heroic narrative, with all the blood, sweat, tears and other bodily substances airbrushed out.

Despite the general perception of the Middle Ages as a dreary time of horrendous moral oppression, there seemed to be no urge to suppress explicit portrayal of either sex or violence in the public sphere. The willingness, even desire, to play up the nasty, gory aspects of the worst martyrdoms of Christian saints was of a piece with the frank naming of streets such as Gropecunt Lane, where ... er ... cunts were groped for money. (During those times, in fact, every major city had such a street, usually just off the main market area. In London, just in case you couldn't find it or somehow failed to get the reference, it was conveniently located between Puppekirtylane, i.e. "Poke-skirt Lane", and Bordhawlane, i.e. "Brothel Lane".)

The idea that the masses -- much less children -- needed to be shielded from the basic messiness of life, for fear of somehow "corrupting" them, simply didn't exist. If there was a cesspool somewhere in a city and nearby streets stank to high heaven, the authorities would likely give those streets names like "Shitteborwe" ("Shit-bury") or "Addle" (originally meaning "urine, liquid filth"). If Chaucer wanted to insert a humorous tale into The Canterbury Tales -- intended as his crowning achievement -- he didn't hesitate to write lines like "And prively he caughte hire by the queynte" ("and intimately he caught her by the cunt") or "But with his mouth he kiste hir naked ers" ("but with his mouth he kissed her naked arse"). When Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence wrote his poem "La Vie de Saint Thomas le Martyr" ("The Life of Saint Thomas the Martyr"), an unreservedly heroic account of the murder of Saint Thomas Becket, he not only wrote that William de Tracy cruelly murdered Becket with a sword but specifically that he "tut l'escervelad" ("completely knocked his brains out").

Yet it's truly interesting what medieval authorities did think they needed to censor from the masses, which was nothing less than the Bible itself. Far from the contemporary evangelical Christian idea that everyone should live their life exclusively according to the words of the Bible, the unfiltered Bible was considered to potentially be extremely dangerous. According to many Church authorities of the time, lay people should never be allowed to read the Bible in its original form, but only told of it through a priestly intermediary. The stories of Jesus preaching people to follow the spirit rather than the letter of the law, and refusing to respect contemporary social hierarchies, and teaching that the lowest prostitute or tax collector was equal to the highest king in the eyes of the Lord, provided they behaved righteously -- and in the Old Testament, of Abraham having multiple wives, Lot's daughters sleeping with their father, a human-like God who suffered human emotions like jealously and was obviously not omniscient, etc. -- were considered shocking and likely to "corrupt" children and uneducated (un-brainwashed?) adults, much like we think of frank portrayals of sex (especially in the U.S.) and violence (especially in Europe). Such stories were only for "mature" and properly "socialized" adults, who could be counted on to interpret them metaphorically, according to their "proper" meaning (as imparted by priests, teachers, and other such authority figures).

Accents and foreign words?

Since when did Pakistan become pronounced "Pahk-is-tahn"? Obama routinely says this, but why? I was just listening to an interview by Charlie Rose of some NYT journalists who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for reporting on Pakistan and Afghanistan. In his introduction, Charlie says "Pahk-is-tahn and Aff-gann-ist-ann" with consistent back /ɑ/ (as in "father") in Pakistan but front /æ/ (as in "fad") in Afghanistan. I say both with all /æ/ sounds (as in "fad"), and I'm positive this is the traditional pronunciation. In fact, Charlie says the word "Pakistan" three times in his short intro, in three different pronunciations: respectively "Pahk-is-tahn", "Pack-is-tann" and "Pahk-is-tann", occurring near the beginning middle and end of the intro. It's also interesting that after the first sentence or so he starts speaking faster and slips into a "hidden but noticeable" southern accent with some dropped /r/'s and some cases of "tahm" instead of "time", but this goes away by the end, where he abruptly slows down and drops the pitch of his voice, ending on the drawn-out "newscaster growl" that is a source of endless amusement in anchorman parodies.

It's as if he really concentrates on "newscasterly" pronunciation at the beginning, then forgets in the middle as he warms to the occasion, and then partly remembers again towards the end where he needs to assume the "newscaster accent" and "newscaster growl" (no southern drawl or informal, sissy speaking allowed!) so that the last thing the viewers remember is that, regardless of whatever else he said, Charlie Rose is definitely a manly newscaster!

Jokes aside, why "Pahk-is-tahn" with "foreign" /ɑ/, but "Aff-gann-ist-ann" with "down-home" front /æ/? Maybe Afghanistan is more "down-home" because now we "own" it, whereas we're only "renting" Pakistan? And when did a preference for faux-foreign pronunciations sneak back in, anyway? It's true we've always had a fad for this: viz. "Ber-LIN" with "foreign stress", and "Bei-ZHING" with "foreign zh", even though the Germans actually say "BER-lin" (so "local" stress would be correct) and the Chinese say "BEI-JING" with normal "j" (IPA /dʒ/) and equal stress on both syllables (so that the "BEI-jing" with "local" stress and "local j" would be quite accurate). And the pronunciation of "lingerie" is a total abomination. But we laugh (or used to laugh?) at pretentious Classical music announcers solemnly declaiming about "Voalf-gahng" Mozart and "Loot-veek foan" Beethoven, especially when they don't even get the foreign pronunciation right (e.g. -wig in Ludwig is properly /vɪç/, something like "vish" but actually using the sound at the beginning of English hue instead of "sh"; definitely not "veek"). Same goes for prissy newscasters who speak of "Nee-kah-RRRAH-wah", said in their best Spanish accent and all too often with a long trilled "r" in the middle that doesn't actually belong here. (But it took me SOOOOOOOOO long to get this sound right! PLEASE PLEASE let me demonstrate my erudition to you! Pretty please?!)

Actually I shouldn't talk. Even I say "Nicka-RAHG-wuh", rather than the British abomination "Nicka-RAGG-you-a". (As in "Best watch out, Nick a rag you a big one if you not carefuh" although I can't for the life of me say what "rag you a big one" actually means. Any takers for some creative retrodefining of this term?)

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