A Brief Intellectual and Semantic History of “Idleness”

Author(s):  
Heidi Liedke
Keyword(s):  
Power at Play ◽  
2009 ◽  
pp. 19-70
Author(s):  
Niels Åkerstrøm Andersen

Author(s):  
Nicholas Heron

The second chapter seeks to deepen and extend Agamben’s analysis by describing the terms of a specifically Christian technology of power. Its point of departure is Erik Peterson’s suggestion that the form of political action specific to Christianity coincides with the Church’s appropriation of the practice that in the ancient Greek polis was termed leitourgia; a suggestion which in turn stimulates a reappraisal of Foucault’s influential notion of pastoral power. “Pastoral power,” the chapter argues, on the basis of a detailed reconstruction of the semantic history of the term (laos) that in the Greek biblical tradition designates the “people” as the referent of pastoral intervention, is more precisely conceived as “liturgical power.” Only by emphasising its liturgical dimension, it contends, can we fully grasp the stakes of the process that Foucault himself suggestively described as the “institutionalisation of the pastorate” and which coincides with the establishment of a fundamental division in the single people of God.


2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARA M. PONS-SANZ

Our etymological understanding of PDE bread has been influenced, to a considerable extent, by Otto Jespersen's comment that ‘An Englishman cannot thrive or be ill or die without Scandinavian words; they are to the language what bread and eggs are to the daily fare.’ This article analyses the evidence behind the possibility that PDE bread might represent a Norse-derived semantic loan, i.e. that OE brēad acquired the meaning ‘bread’, which was more frequently expressed by OE hlāf, because of the influence of its Viking Age Norse cognate (cp. OIc brauð ‘bread’). On the basis of an in-depth study of the attestations of OE brēad and hlāf and their early Middle English reflexes, as well as the use of their cognates in various Germanic languages, the article challenges the traditional view that OE brēad originally meant ‘piece, morsel of bread’ and concludes that Norse influence is not needed in order to account for the semantic history of PDE bread.


2021 ◽  
pp. 82-93
Author(s):  
Yurii Osinchuk

In the article religious vocabulary is studied in the diachronic aspect based on the material of different genres and different styles of Ukrainian written monuments of the 16th – 18th centuries (act books of city governments, city and provincial courts, village councils, privileges, land lustration, books of income and expenditure, wills, deeds, descriptions of castles, universals of hetman offices, documents of church and school brotherhoods, chronicles, works of religious, polemical and fiction literature, monuments of scientific and educational literature, liturgical literature, epistolary heritage, etc.), included in the sources «Dictionary of the Ukrainian language of the 16th – first half of the 17th century», “Mapping of the Historical Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language”, edited by Ye. Tymchenko and their lexical card indexes, which are stored in the Department of the Ukrainian language of the Ivan Krypiakevych Institute of Ukrainian Studies of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (Lviv). In particular, names related to religious teachings, religions, and names of persons according to their attitude to a particular faith or religion are reviewed. The article focuses on the etymological analysis of religious names, which was primarily focused on the clarification of their semantic etymon. It has been established that the words of the studied lexico-semantic group are not genetically homogeneous, as it includes tokens of different origins, including borrowings from the Greek language, Church Slavonic, Latin, Polonism, etc. Some Church Slavonic names originated as a semantic calque from Greek words. It is observed that the semantic history of some studied words in the Ukrainian language dates back to the early monuments of the Kyivan Rus period. The historical fate of names associated with religious teachings and religions is not the same. Mostly, these names have survived in the modern Ukrainian literary language and liturgical practice. Others were archaized or preserved in Ukrainian dialects. In some religious names, there are vivid features of the Ukrainian language of the 16th – 18th centuries. It has been found that some of the studied tokens act as core components of various two-membered or three-membered stable and lexicalized phrases.


Author(s):  
John T. Hamilton

What does the term “security” express? What are or have been its semantic functions: its shifting cultural connotations and its divergent discursive values? This chapter examines the figures and metaphors that have been deployed to think about security across the ages. It outlines the main stations along the word's complex itinerary through historical usage. It begins with a cursory overview that marks the major turning points of this history, beginning with ancient Rome and concluding with seventeenth-century Europe. Among the topics covered is the positive sense of security that established its position as a central topic in political philosophy in the work of Thomas Hobbes. Throughout, the affirmation of security as a good is fundamentally connected with the power of sovereignty to alleviate the cares and concerns of its subjects. The state emerges as an institution that protects its citizens from all varieties of existential threats, from external aggression as well as from internal discord.


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