This is one of those posts that satisfies both halves of the blog name. Trevor Joyce called my attention to Malachi O’Doherty’s recent Belfast Telegraph column “Hats off to those who make the right choice in headwear,” quoted in full at his Facebook post, knowing I would appreciate this section:
If you look at old pictures of Belfast, or any other city, you notice that everyone is wearing a hat.
There are the boaters of the dandies, the dunchers of the working men, the caps on the boys, the bonnets on the ladies. Caps were still a standard part of a school uniform up to the 1960s.
At church, the women were obliged to cover their heads and the men to uncover theirs, the implication perhaps being that a woman looks more like a sinner without a hat whereas a man looks more dashing and daring with one.
The hat, more than any other garment, was a badge of class, from the top hat of the arrogant to the pork pie of the humble.
I wear a duncher, perhaps more commonly called ‘a cloth cap’. It keeps my head warm since I don’t have enough hair to do that for me.
Mine are all made with Donegal tweed so they suggest ethnicity. They were also regarded as the hat of the working classes though they seem popular among horse breeders.
A fuller, larger duncher than mine is called the newsboy, presumably because it was worn by the boys who sold newspapers on the streets, without whom journalism wouldn’t have functioned. With their folded bundles of papers under one arm, they shouted ‘Sixth Tele!’ and ‘Ulster!’, and they could peel off and fold a paper for you with one hand while counting and pocketing your coins with the other.
I see the duncher as unaffected. At least, I wear it to affect the impression that I am unaffected.
Trevor had never come across the term “duncher” before, and no more had I; the OED (entry revised 2018) has:
1. A cow or sheep that is given to butting. Also (Irish English (northern)): a hornless cow. […]
2. Irish English (northern). A cloth cap with a peak; a flat cap. Also more fully duncher cap.
1914 A grey cap with a flat peak. The wee lad said it was a duncher.
St. J. G. Ervine, Mrs. Martin’s Man xvi. 205 […]
It gives the etymology as “< dunch v. [‘To deliver a short, sharp blow to; Of a cow, sheep, etc.: to butt (someone or something) with the head’] + -er suffix¹” with the note “In sense 2 apparently so called on account of its resemblance to the flat head of a hornless cow.” Is anybody familiar with this striking word?
I’m still not 100% clear what a “duncher cap” is (or rather, what it is not). A Google image search of “duncher cap” brings up more than one type. I assume the duncher is the flat topped one, or simply flat cap. (A Google image search of “newsboy cap” leaves me none the wiser…. They look the same.)
I have a cap of this type, i.e., “flat cap”, that I bought in China, where it was labelled a 鴨舌帽 yāshémào or “duck-tongued hat”. However, a Google image search of 鴨舌帽 turns up a number of different types, too, including the ordinary baseball cap.
One of those words that drip with onomatopoeia but one can’t quite say why. I’m reminded of Hungarian csont (“bone”), which strikes my ear as almost the inevitable choice for a Magyar Adam to have made. A wet-grey cartilaginous sound-feel of bone shunting against bone, at a joint.
Heh. OED, for the verb dunch: “Origin uncertain; probably imitative.”
One of those words that drip with onomatopoeia but one can’t quite say why. I’m reminded of Hungarian csont (“bone”), which strikes my ear as almost the inevitable choice for a Magyar Adam to have made. A wet-grey cartilaginous sound-feel of bone shunting against bone, at a joint.
I agree on both counts.
If having a duncher made of Donegal tweed suggests an ethnicity, what material do you use to signal the Other-Leading-Brand ethnicity in the context of Belfast?
The “ethnicity” in question is probably “Irish” rather than “Catholic Irish”. The latter is, in politically correct terminology, a “community” or “tradition”, not an ethnicity.
More examples of dunch in the EDD. Alas, no duncher caps. The -ch is pronounced /ʃ/ in Scotland and sometimes further south.
DUNCHACH, DUNS(C)HACH, DUNSHEUGH, n.
1. A heavy blow, a thud (Mry.1 1925, dunshach; Bnff. 1866 Gregor D. Bnff. 42, dunschach; Abd.15 1950); a nudge (Per. 1900 E.D.D., dunsheugh).Mry. 1927 E. B. Levack Stories Old Lossiemouth 41:
An, mony . . . a dunt . . . an’ mony a . . . dunchach got he.
2. “A big, untidy bundle of anything, mostly of rags” (Bnff. 1866 Gregor D. Bnff. 42; Bnff.2, Abd.2 1941).Ib.:
Ge’ me doon that dunschach o’ cloots oot o’ the hehd o’ the press till a’ see an’ get a bit to row up ma finger.
[From Dunch, + -ach.]
https://dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/dunchach
Somehow for me, a dunschach of cloots suggests the proto-tam-o-shanter or ur-duncher, keeping the rain and less frequently the sun off the head of the humble labourer in the fields.
I appreciate mollymooly’s reminder re the polite terminology, but I’m still puzzled because an “ethnicity” is really only meaningful when it contrasts in context with some other group. If everyone in Belfast (except recent immigrants etc.) is ethnically “Irish” regardless of “community” or “tradition,” who are the people whose dunchers are not made of Donegal tweed and how would you describe them as a group? Are they just more assimilated/globalized Irish people who are less overtly demonstrative about their Irishness and thus happy to wear a duncher made of the same material as e.g. that of the cap worn by Andy Capp on the other side of the Irish Sea?
I assumed “Mine are all made with Donegal tweed so they suggest ethnicity” simply meant “Northern Irish.”
@jwb
Not sure if molly meant this, but
(a) Ireland is a relatively classless society (compared esp. to Southern England). Andy Capp is a working class Cockney, and his middle class counterpart would have worn more formal headgear, typically a bowler hat.
(b) there is a whole mystique in Ireland around certain handcrafted items, including Donegal tweed. They connect one to a legacy of physically active and morally sound fishermen and crofters, and remind one of the possibility of distinctly Irish products (not pale imitations of English ones) that are as good as any other nation’s.
So I read him as proud to identify himself as Irish, rather than embarrassed at not being more like (the picture one has in Ireland of) the English.
I used to think of Andy Capp as Cockney too, but he lives in Hartlepool, in the northeast. I suppose his calling his wife “pet” should have been a clue he wasn’t in London.
Ireland may have been less class-ridden than England, but the excerpt in the OP specifically references headgear as a “badge of class.”
Can anyone find a photo of the late Rev’d Dr. Ian Paisley in a duncher? I did a search for “Ian Paisley in a hat,” but only got hits for him wearing what I think I would call a fedora.
@J.W. Brewer:
Surely the contrasting group can be “all of humanity except this one ethnicity.” This feels common for untroubled ethnicities like mine. I cannot think of any specific fabric or garment that’s specifically invested with Italianness, to parallel the Irishness of Donegal tweed. However, I suspect Italians are liable to think with some generality of Italian clothes as more elegant and higher quality, and to take a certain pride in it. That doesn’t require any specific foil.
@KI
I remembered that after I posted….oops
@ J.W. Brewer:
The article mentions that “Rev Ian Paisley wore a heavy fur hat, sensibly prioritising a warm head over style and, at the same time, providing some protection against batons, bottles and stones.” Pictures of him in a fur hat are not hard to find.
I’m not a great Paisley-spotter, but I presume this is a rare photo of him in a duncher cap.
Not saying that ethnically self-conscious Irish-Americans *wouldn’t* wear it, but in a U.S. context I associate Donegal tweed with sportcoats (and occasionally full suits with matching trousers) made by the old-line clothiers whose traditional audience was the old WASP elite and younger non-WASP’s who forever reason wanted to emulate the pre-hippie-era “Ivy League” style. Somewhere in a closet I have a nice Donegal tweed suit that fit me well when I was 25 years younger and some inches more slender around the midsection. It was made by J. Press, whose Ashkenazic-family founders sold out to the Japanese back in the Eighties, Japan apparently being full of aficionados for the style.
Part of the cultural/semiotic context was that the American WASP elite was too many generations removed from their poor/thrifty farm-wife great-great-grandmothers who did their own spinning and weaving to make clothes for the household that they thought that weaving high-quality “artisanal” cloth that your tailor would then make your clothes out of was not to be done “in-house” but was one of those things you farmed out to other ethnic groups with a traditional knack for that sort of thing, be they Celtic or Italian etc.
the wonderful (and lamented) Irish Imports store in north cambridge stocked a wide range of what i now can call dunchers (i suspect labeled as “flat caps” or “newsboy caps” if they were labeled at all). i can certainly confirm that in the boston context of the 90s (and i assume 80s) it’s the cloth they were made of (irish wool, often tweed, in earth tones with light patterning from the weave) that would’ve marked them as specifically irish, in contrast to the similarly-shaped cotton or felt fisherman’s caps and multicolored rasta tams that were also around. as specifically marked as the caps were, though, i wouldn’t’ve assumed that a person wearing one was necessarily irish.
Bathrobe – the flat cap fits close to the head on the sides and back: https://weaversofireland.com/tweed-flat-cap-charcoal?sku=0000028703-000092639&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiAx_GqBhBQEiwAlDNAZqWT8M6RJFDEJ2dTRAy7hvIP9EE_QcOzwEFsnUfqeEj0T2jJl1G6rRoCtE8QAvD_BwE
The newsboy is fuller and flops a bit over the side and back of the head. https://hannahats.com/collections/newsboy-caps
I suspect the newsboy got its name from the way an adult-sized cap fits on a boy’s head.
Related to Scottish ‘dunt’? But I’d call the hat a bunnet.
For some reason I really want to write flat cap as ‘flap cat’. What’s the opposite of a spoonerism?
The newsboy is fuller and flops a bit
What a floppy little bunny rabbit ! But you can’t fool me into buying, I wouldn’t look that cute even with three of those hats on.
I assumed “Mine are all made with Donegal tweed so they suggest ethnicity” simply meant “Northern Irish.”
Oh the Lord save us and guard us, Northern Irish an ethnicity! That won’t do at all at all at all. True green nationalists may grudgingly say “Northern Ireland” if the context makes it absolutely necessary, but the demonym/adjectival form “Northern Irish” is verboten as conferring too much legitimacy on the British-imposed failed statelet. Less tendentiously, “Northern Irish” is a census option (in Northern Ireland, not the republic) for “national identity” alongside “British” and/or “Irish”. wikipedia)
A separate point is that Donegal is not in Northern Ireland, despite being the northernmost county on the island.
Northern Ireland census 2021
* “How would you describe your national identity? Tick all that apply” British, Irish, Northern Irish, English, Scottish, Welsh, Other write in
* “What is your ethnic group? Tick one box only” White, Chinese, Irish Traveller, Roma, Indian, Filipino, Black African, Black Other, Mixed ethnic group write in, Any other ethnic group write in
* two separate religion questions “What religion, religious denomination or body do you belong to” and “What religion, religious denomination or body were you brought up in?” Roman Catholic, Presbyterian Church in Ireland, Church of Ireland, Methodist Church in Ireland, Other write in
Republic of Ireland census 2022
“What is your ethnic group/ background?” Numbered options grouped into letters
[A White] Irish, Irish Traveller, Roma, other
[B Black or Black Irish] African, other
[C Asian or Asian Irish] Chinese, Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi, other
[D Other] Arabic, Mixed write in, Other write in
“What is your religion, if any?” No religion, Roman Catholic, Church of Ireland, Islam, Orthodox Christian, Presbyterian, Other write in
Thanks for the much-needed lesson! I clearly don’t know enough about the Emerald Isle.
Neither government’s census gives “Cru[i]thin” as an ethnic-self-identification option for the more stubborn or obscurantist Scotch-Irish?
Can one say that Donegal is northern Irish, with the n pronounced in lower case (as one pronounces initial ff in Welsh names)?
One might say “Donegal is in the north of Ireland”, except “the north of Ireland” is a term the above-mentioned true greens use to mean “N*rthern Irel*nd”. The best formulation is probably “Donegal is in the north of the Island of Ireland”. Two capital I’s.
Donegal is part of the province of Ulster (one of the traditional four provinces of Ireland), but it is not part of the political entity of Northern Ireland. NI contains six of the eight counties of Ulster. Hence it is sometimes referred to as “The Six Counties”.
Donegal is part of the province of Ulster (one of the traditional four provinces of Ireland)
Ah, that’s likely the source of my confusion.
And of course the problem is compounded by the tendency of people of different political inclination than the “true greens” referenced above to use “Ulster” somewhat imprecisely to mean “that substantial portion of historical Ulster that has remained part of the U.K.” I don’t think too many of that “community” in N.I. actually have irredentist claims on Cos. Cavan, Donegal &/or Monaghan.
I just realized I’ve never understood how people who live near the relevant part of the Dutch-Belgian border avoid confusion in casual conversation between the Dutch province of “Limburg” and the adjoining Belgian province of “Limburg.” (They had formed a single province during the interlude from 1815 to 1830 when the whole territory had the same sovereign, although that was at the time kind of a dodgy renaming since that single province did not overlap very much with the onetime territory of the medieval Duchy of Limburg.) Maybe it’s like the wicked old imperialist days in Africa when you might say “Belgian Congo” or “French Congo” (or “Portuguese Guinea” versus “Spanish Guinea”) and confusion was thereby avoided?
Of course, things being complex in that part of the world, the entire historical nine counties of Ulster do retain a certain fugitive unity in some spheres of human endeavor – e.g. there’s a provincial all-star team playing Gaelic football (and ditto for hurling) which draws players from both sides of the current international border.
@mollymooly:
I’m unsure you’ll prefer “Northern Irelander” as a “race group,” but tell that to the United States Census Bureau!
The 2020 U.S. population census asked:
The tabulations then report the following race groups from the British Isles.
Digging into the fine print, the mysterious “British Islander” group combines Channel Islander and Gibraltarian, which I understand, and British Islander, which I don’t.
¡¿Gibraltar is an island?!
…and the Catholic bishop of Limburg sits in Germany.
I’ll once again provide the explanation I was given when I was little: if you’re a knight and you leave your helmet on when you walk into someone’s home, that means you expect to need it, and that means you’re accusing your host of being Dr. Murder. Somehow, all headgear on men and boys came to be interpreted as helmets, and that’s why so many teachers get so very upset when a little boy who’s too much into sportsball keeps his baseball cap on in class.
The stupidity of it all was, let’s say, fascinating to watch again and again and again.
Milan still has a reputation for fashion, and ultra montes tailored suits are more or less expected to be Italian.
Not yet, but with the 1.5 °C goal going up in smoke, it’s only a matter of decades.
@GP: I don’t think anyone in the current US calls those fill-in-the-blank “origin” groups “race groups.” Most folks might say “ethnic group.” “National origin” (meaning ancestry as well as personal origin) tends to turn up as the relevant phrasing in e.g. U.S. statutes prohibiting discrimination in employment etc. “based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin,” to quote one. The Census Bureau is even vaguer as you can see in this recent press release about “people with Irish ancestry.” https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/03/happy-saint-patricks-day-to-one-of-ten-americans-who-claim-irish-ancestry.html
Note that “Scots-Irish” (which presumably subsumes those who like myself might use the good old spelling “Scotch-Irish”) is over 150x more common than the near-synonym “Northern Irelander.”
For some reason I really want to write flat cap as ‘flap cat’. What’s the opposite of a spoonerism?
A forkerism. When the middles are swapped, as in the Duck and Doochess for the Duke and Duchess, it’s a kniferism. I think these terms were invented by Douglas Hofstadter and/or his students, but I don’t know for sure.
accusing your host of being Dr. Murder
Murder me?! Murder you!
@J.W. Brewer:
I don’t think so either, but Census terminology is its own world, whose latest explanation is provided by the 2020 Census Detailed Demographic and Housing Characteristics File A (Detailed DHC-A) Technical Documentation. The fundamental issue is that the Census asks three separate questions about (1) ethnicity, (2) race and (3) ancestry.
The distinction between the first two is a legal requirement.
Following these rules, Census data report as strictly separate concepts “race” on one side and “Hispanic origin” or “ethnicity” on the other.
The separate concept of “ancestry” derives from the weird custom the Census had until 2020 of breaking down into further considerable detail the race categories for Asian and for Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander (and I think also for American Indian or Alaska Native, but I have less professional experience with that part of the data), but not those for White and for Black or African American.
To compensate, it asked a subset of respondents, in the 1980, 1990 and 2000 long-form census and subsequently in the American Community Survey, a separate question about their ancestry. It still asks that, and the relevant categories are: British, British Isles, Channels Islander, Gibraltarian, Cornish, English, Irish, Manx, North Irish, Scotch Irish, Scottish, Irish Scotch, Celtic. I’m intrigued by the distinction between Scotch Irish and Irish Scotch.
This implied the puzzling convention that Mexican is an ethnicity, Chinese a race, and Irish an ancestry. The 2020 update has tried to reduce these categories to the legal minimum of two, adding the breakdown of White and of Black or African American to the baseline race question. That helpfully yields more data, but unhelpfully yields more clashes between different Census data sources.
In fact, the Census internally has separate counts for one ethnicity, one race, and one ancestry group for each Spanish-speaking country. But it mostly hides them so data users’ minds are not blown by their large differences. E.g., in the 2020 census 5.6 million respondents reported their ethnicity as Cuban, but only 2.2 million reported their race as Cuban (alone or in any combination), and in 2000 (we are not told for 2020) only 1.1 million reported their ancestry as Cuban.
While the Census is pretty strict about what it calls “ethnicity”, “race” and “ancestry” (regardless of what the terms may mean in natural language), it is not strict when naming the categories that make up each classification. I can find traces of “races,” “race categories” and “race responses.” Nonetheless, “race groups” seems to be the preferred term.
David Marjanović, 1 Corinthians 11:3-16 (NIV) (variants ommitted)
But I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.
Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head.
But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head—it is the same as having her head shaved.
For if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off; but if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should cover her head.
A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man.
For man did not come from woman, but woman from man;
neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.
It is for this reason that a woman ought to have authority over her own head, because of the angels.
Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman.
For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman. But everything comes from God.
Judge for yourselves: Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered?
Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him,
but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For long hair is given to her as a covering. If anyone wants to be contentious about this, we have no other practice—nor do the churches of God.
Ah yeah. So the prohibition on head coverings while praying or prophesying (reinterpreted as “in church”) and the prohibition on head coverings in any other closed room have separate origins and merged.
1 Corinthians 11:3-16: There are several “citation needed” / “says who” moments in there. But Paul clearly thought it was a cogent argument, so I suppose a lot of it was held as self-evident truths at the time.
This is one of those Pauline passages that were obviously composed orally, written down by an amanuensis, and not edited before sending the letter.
An important collection of Central Asian hats is coming up for auction early next month.
Those dervish hats are excellent, as is the Druze skullcap.
woman is the glory of man.
For man did not come from woman, but woman from man;
neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.
I now have a principled basis for rejecting Christianity.
@bathrobe
If you reject any thought/belief system because an influential proponent (no one is attributing this stuff to Jesus) is judged by subsequent generations to be an unrepentant racist/sexist/speciesist/homophobe/excessive emitter of greenhouse gas/ageist/germaphobe/misanthropist/wet blanket/egoist/whatever, you may end up with no option but solipsism.
Have there been any Christian sects which explicitly rejected Paul’s writings, while accepting the rest of the NT?
“woman is the glory of man.
For man did not come from woman, but woman from man;
neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.”
I now have a principled basis for rejecting Christianity.
Well, that belief is based on the story of the creation of Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis so you might be implicitly rejecting Judaism as well.
The thing is though, that creation story has Man and Woman made of the same stuff, unlike other myths where Man and Woman are created separately out of separate stuffs. There is an argument to be made that the status of women in Judeo-Christian societies, generally and relatively speaking, has tended to be somewhat better in comparison to other societies partly as a result of that.
When Eve is presented to Adam for the first time he says, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh;”. I once heard that described as the world’s first love song.
@Y: Not necessarily, but plenty of now-existing sects which have worked out to their own satisfaction that various statements in the Pauline corpus are not, if properly interpreted, normative or binding for all times and places and in particular not to be treated as literally authoritative in the time and place in which the particular sect is promulgating such an interpretation. As to the particular example, the percentage of American women who cover their heads when attending church has plummeted dramatically within my own lifetime, and the same is true in some, but not necessarily all, other countries.
One might also note that it has long been traditional for a subset of males with specific ecclesiastical functions to wear hats in church, e.g. bishop’s miters but other examples as well, and this was always somehow understood to be not-incongruent with the Pauline passage quoted above. Similarly, the literal interpretation of the seeming Pauline injunction against long hair on men has been received variously: in the Eastern Orthodox world, some monastics/clergy/bishops have extremely long hair, typically pulled back into a ponytail, and a good rule of thumb is that the longer the hair (and, often relatedly, the more bushy or unkempt the beard), the more old-fashioned the ecclesial worldview. If the dude in the cassock looks, hairstylewise, like he could have fit in quite well with the Allman Bros. circa ’71 you do not want to get him going on the wickedness of the Gregorian Calendar unless you have a couple hours to spare.
@Bathrobe, “woman for man” can most definitely be used for sexist purposes.
But it can be used to make a number of other points and per se it is just a historical fact (said in Genesis), so the question is what point he is making here.
And I simply do not understand.
Neither I understand “It is for this reason that a woman ought to have authority over her own head, because of the angels.“
… you may end up with no option but solipsism.
Atheism? It’s a broad church.
Wherefrom is the (yoof) male habit of wearing a baseball cap indoors? You’d expect that to continue into middle age to cover bald spots, etc; but that’s not happening round these parts.
I’m sufficiently old-fashioned to find the habit disrespectful/that it says a lot about the wearer’s attitude — and fashion sense (lack of).
@JWB: I don’t mean interpretations of convenience. I meant an explicit rejection of Paul for being a beady-eyed meanie, in contrast to his Teacher, and thus considering part of the NT to be godly, and another part un-.
Well, i don’t understand it at all.
What does “glory” mean, what it has to do with woman for man, and what it has to do with what you wear when you pray or prophesise?
___
Does Christianity recognise that prophets may keep revealing God’s messages in future?
Why Jesus is long-haired?
“ Does Christianity recognise that prophets may keep revealing God’s messages in future?”
Generally speaking, no. There might be some smaller churches or sects who believe so but if so then they are in the minority. Mormons believe that their founder received new divine revelations but Christians ( or I believer the majority of them) don’t regard the Mormons as being Christian ( as nice as they are ) owing to their beliefs about the nature of God and of Jesus.
For Catholics, public revelation ended with the death of the last apostle St. John. There is something called “private revelation” where an individual like a saint or mystic might have a vision or knowledge about something, and the church’s authority might judge that message as being compatible with church doctrine and worthy of belief, but but the faithful aren’t required to believe it like the “public revelation” that is in Sacred Scripture and in Sacred Tradition ( which is believed to be handed down from the apostles) and the private revelation doesn’t add anything new to the public revelation.
This, by the way, is one reason why we can’t have Kahlil Gibran read at a Catholic wedding ( I saw the thread where the story was mentioned.) It wasn’t the priest being a buzzkill. To do so would make it seem that those writings are church teaching and to put Gibran’s writings on the level of the Holy Bible and that would be silly.
because of the angels
No one knows what this means. Tomas Aquinas even suggested (inter alia) that angels are priests and women should veil their heads not to “excite their concupiscence” (propter eorum cautelam, ne scilicet ex conspectu mulierum non velatarum ad concupiscentiam provocentur, to add to our discussion of conspect). My personal explanation (reached after about a 10 minute introspection) is that angels, not having sex (I mean, gender) of their own are not very good at distinguishing men from women and people should give them clear visual clues.
That story about helmets sounds like the anthropological version of folk etymology. A more natural explanation, at least in my view, is that wearing a hat in someone else’s shop or dwelling is an insult to their roof and thus, more broadly, to their hospitality. Whether this was really the origin of the practice Paul called for is unclear.
@Brett, DM,
if the helmet can be removed with relative ease, then taking it off indeed can either be a gesture of politeness or even a matter of practical convenience (in which case not taking it off will be marked).
I’m sceptical, but “insult to their roof” seems even worse. Here you don’t start with helmets, but… there is simply does not happen that you enter a room, and it is not raining there, but you’re keeping your hat on because you’re afraid it will be.
(there is such a practical issue as “the host’s little daughter will start playing with your hair”, but in this case a hat won’t help, you need a helmet)
@Pancho one reason why we can’t have Kahlil Gibran read at a Catholic wedding ( I saw the thread where the story was mentioned.) It wasn’t the priest being a buzzkill.
Well done for remembering! That was me proposing reading Gibran. I sure as fuck wasn’t going to read St Paul-the-misogynist. Whatever the priest thought he was doing, it felt like buzzkill: add it to my hatred of Catholic hierarchy (not of congregations, I hasten to add) — but small beer, they’re guilty of far worse child abuses.
wearing a hat in someone else’s shop or dwelling is an insult to their roof and thus, more broadly, to their hospitality.
Exactly. Like they can’t/won’t keep the roof repaired, so visitors have to make shift for themselves to keep off the sun/rain/birdshit.
@Pancho, thank you! I simply never thought about it. I know biblical prophets, and I know, there is a space for personal mystical experience in the Christian religion. But for some reason it never occured to me to ask what Christian theology would think of a prophet in modern context (even though I did think about possibility of such situation).
I didn’t know the distrinction between “public” and “private” revelation other than from my personal reflections on the matter (the status of “revelation” in Christianity is something I did think about).
Actually biblical prophets may not as much alter the doctrine as just tell everyone that everyone is an asshole and must stop being an asshole because God is getting angry.
Actually biblical prophets may not as much alter the doctrine as just tell everyone that everyone is an asshole and must stop being an asshole because God is getting angry.
That would definitely be my summary of those books.
So if you or your wife ever consider doing this, you must take the hat off your head and put it on your wife’s, no matter who’s speaking at the moment.
(but of coruse you need the revelation first)
There appear to be supply-chain issues with my revelation.
Because, in the Western Middle Ages, serfs were shorn, free men in general and kings in particular had rather long hair because they could, and monks had the tonsure as a sign of humility. It is said of the last Merovingian king that he “sat on his throne with his long hair” and couldn’t really do anything else until he was shorn and put in a monastery.
I’m not sure if any kings in this culture went short-haired before Napoleon did.
I think all the bewigged ones had short hair underneath. And the bald ones.
@DM, but Jesus is long-haired in the east as well, and I think since before the Franks.
Actually, one natural question then is what were Middle Eastern (and Jewish in particular) fashions as opposed to Greek ones at the time?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christ_with_beard.jpg – “During the 4th century Jesus was beginning to be depicted as a man of identifiably Jewish appearance, with a full beard and long hair, a style not usually worn by Romans. “
Oh, interesting. I knew Jesus was depicted as short-haired and clean-shaven in earlier Roman portrayals, but not when that stopped.
…wait. I did; I saw it on TV once. It’s when the Mandylion of, uh, Şanlıurfa became the standard depiction of Jesus.
…no, because that’s really not likely to have been before the 6th century. Hm.
Well, it all is described in WP, Depiction of Jesus.
tell since when: around 300 AD. So basically since when Christianity became official.
There is also long-haired “Standing Caliph” on Umayyad coins. Some think he’s ʿAbd al-Malik, others think Muhammad.
who forever reason [sic; recte who for whatever reason]
That is a truly magnificent speech (so to speak) error, unless indeed it is an ill-considered deletion.
eight provinces
Nine, unless someone has changed them while I wasn’t looking; the Six plus three in the Republic. Still, considering that there are four provinces despite the Irish word cúige ‘province’ being transparently < cuig ‘five’, enumeration may not have been a particular talent of my ancestors. (In fact, the old provinces of Leinster and Meath were merged in late Norman times because the Pale of Settlement overlapped them, making it convenient to treat them as a single entity.)
Jus one universe away, Leinster was re-divided along linguistic lines. The outcome of 1919-1922 was an Ireland still mostly Irish-speaking, but completely free of Cambria politically. However, there were a large number of Brithenig-speakers in the east: the line was drawn to more or less enclose them as a European-style national minority, as there never had been any nationwide Brithenig-ization policy.
Note that historically Ulster had been the center of Goedelitas on both sides of the sea, and that was precisely why the English and Scots settled it with such brutal enthusiasm. The Cambrians were more interested at first in suppressing piracy and slave-taking, which is why they dominated the eastern coast.
Oh, so it is:
Seems to rule out long-haired Frankish kings as the trigger (if not as a reinforcing factor).
That makes sense.
By the way, since the Taliban won I often see long-haired Talibs.
Does anyone know why?