The cultural divide

Two great texts have had profound influence on the English language – the works of Shakespeare and the King James version of the Bible. Both have left us vocabulary items, but more importantly, they have left idioms – stereotypes – stories that we all share.

The words they have left are often archaisms – words preserved in the aspic of great writing, and protected from the changes that are wrought from day to day on lesser language. Brows beetle, in this writing, the rump-fed runyon is arointed.

 Other words have moved into general use. 

The Epiphany of the Bible is when Christ was revealed to the Magi. Now the Huffington Post lists 8 epiphanies you should have and defines an epiphany as a glorious AHA moment. Like when you suddenly see your significant other with the rose-coloured glasses, or you realise that you hate your job but it is all that you can do.

 The TV series American Dad is subtitled An Apocalypse to Remember. In the Book of Revelation the Apocalypse is the moment when good triumphs over evil and the present age comes to an end.

Our world is peopled by Judases and Shylocks, we have the patience of Job or the ardour of Romeo and we applaud the good Samaritans. We complain when something is a millstone around our necks. We know that pride goes before a fall (a very abbreviated version of a Proverb) and we should neither a borrower nor a lender be (from the speech of Polonius in Hamlet).

 We have, as reference and illustration, the stories of Romeo and Juliet, the Tower of Babel, Cain and Abel. These can all serve as parallels to a contemporary experience.

 To what extent do we still draw on these resources? Once the Bible and Shakespeare were frequently quoted. Both works provided a common ground between the writer and the reader, the speaker and the listener. Nowadays this is no longer true.

 On the one hand there is no reason to complain. As long as we all share our understanding of the phrase it doesn’t matter what its origin was.  And yet …

 ‘The writing’s on the wall’ is a remark that people today would certainly understand – they would take it to mean that a negative outcome is a certainty. But as they use this phrase they would not have in mind its origin – the grim moment in Belshazzar’s feast, recounted in the Book of Daniel, when the moving finger wrote a message of imminent doom on the wall. Spoiler alert - for those of you who don’t know the ending - Belshazzar, King of Babylon, whose crime was profaning the sacred vessels taken from the Temple in Jerusalem, essentially by using the chalice as his own personal wine cup – well, he was killed that night by the Persians.

 Do we lose something when the idioms are cut adrift from the story and the image that gave rise to them?

 The common ground for contemporary reference is more likely to be popular culture. Like Seinfeld.

Yadda, yadda, yadda!

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! 

The soup Nazi lives on and has turned into the grammar Nazi and the nipple Nazi.

 And from Sesame Street we might get:

A dictionary editor is so often misunderstood – it’s not easy being green.

 It is scarcely possible to quote Shakespeare today except in jest. 

The bus disappears into the distance. ‘Damn – missed it! ‘

 ‘My kingdom for a horse’  I might say.

 The Bible would be even harder to work into the average conversation.

 So is there now a cultural divide between those whose mental wallpaper is classical and those for whom it is entirely contemporary?