<snip>
Caritas is such a beautiful word, and with a beautiful meaning. But it has
its flipside, that saying "as cold as charity". Charity in that sense - the
patronising of the poor by the better off - must differ considerably from
caritas..
<snip>
Yes. Affection is warm. Not so reason and fear.
One issue is why (or how) you get temperature mapped onto charity, unless
it's vice versa. I dislike the conventional explanation < unheated
charitable institutions and so forth. On the other hand I'm not entirely
unconvinced, and I don't really have anything better.
Another is how two different senses get mixed up. And clearly this is a
conceptual issue: 'I love you a million pounds,' as a child might say. Or as
in English 'dear'. It's already there in Classical Latin, where 'caritas'
can mean both *costliness* and *esteem*. It continues in, for example,
modern Italian caro/a..
What I'm saying (I suppose) is that 'charity' in its more bleakly
eleemosynary sense bears somewhat the same relation to Charity (= *caritas*)
as *price* bears to *value*.
<snip>
Pompous? Surely not!
<snip>
Oh dear. As bad as that.
In which case I shall just tell you that Anthony Newley's version of *'Yes!
We Have No Bananas* from the very early sixties was particularly grim.
Though perhaps rather less so than Frankie Vaughan's of *I'm Shy, Mary
Ellen, I'm Shy*, another elderly song.
Fortunately, I have forgotten what either of these sounded like and have no
wish now to remind myself...
CW
____________________________________
Wasting all my days...
Boatman, I've come to the river at a bad time.
I don't know your name.
(Baul singer in Ghatak's 'Cloud Capped Star')
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