Thursday

While exploring Bradley Birzer's works earlier this week, I came across this essay of his about foul language. It's worth reading:

One of America's most insightful cultural critics, Tom Wolfe, has correctly labeled this relatively new usage and over-usage of a horrific vulgarity, a “patois.” In a rather comic passage in his profound and disturbing look at the very deconstruction of an intelligent young woman's soul, I am Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe notes with surprising effectiveness that the foul word that was once a description of what one barnyard animal does to another has become so omnipresent that the only time it's really not employed in the language is when it's meant to describe what it originally meant. “Rarely–the usage had become somewhat archaic–but every now and then it referred to sexual intercourse.”

I also found this essay about October, which reflects things I've thought about fall for many years:

In the haunting twilight of the month, the veil between this world and the next seems extraordinarily thin. In the dusk of it all, the season of this world on the verge of death, life becomes something more, almost darkly sacramental. The atmosphere becomes strangely tangible.

Ghosts, spirits, ghouls, faeries, shades, and other ghastly creatures become so much more real.

So do the saints. St. Francis (feast day of October 4) sang of Brother Fire, Sister Moon, and Mother Earth. Sts. Ewald the Dark, Francis Xavier, Canog, Apollinaris, Sergius, Cergonius, Ethelburga, Edwin of Northumbria, Felix, Hedwig, Ambrose, Balderic, Teresa of Avila, Theofrid, Cadfarch, Hildemarca, Fidelis, and Anastasia II all sit comfortably on the calendar.

Odd, that he didn't mention the Little Flower, but even such omissions can be forgiven.