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Elaine Pagels
“When John accuses 'evildoers' of leading gullible people into sin, what troubles him is what troubled the Essenes: whether - or how much - to accommodate pagan culture. And when we see Jesus' earliest followers, including Peter, James, and Paul, not as we usually see them, as early Christians, but as they saw themselves - as Jews who had found God's messiah - we can see that they struggled with the same question. For when John charges that certain prophets and teachers are encouraging God's people to eat 'unclean' food and engage in 'unclean' sex, he is taking up arguments that had broken out between Paul and followers of James and Peter about forty years earlier - an argument that John of Patmos continues with a second generation of Paul's followers. For when we ask, who are the 'evildoers' against whom John warns? we may be surprised at the answer. Those whom John says Jesus 'hates' look very much like Gentile followers of Jesus converted through Paul's teaching. Many commentators have pointed out that when we step back from John's angry rhetoric, we can see that the very practices John denounces are those that Paul had recommended.”
― Elaine Pagels, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation

Jaroslav Rudiš
“Tyfus byl v Praze a přivez zprávu roku že se v Plzni chystá za měsíc festival kde maj vystoupit pankový kapely taky Die Toten Hosen a možná i Sex Pistols protože to má bejt velkej světovej koncert na oslavu míru tak se možná daj dohromady.

Helmut ale říká že na Polácích říkali že Pistole byli vždycky jen na prachy a že byli vymyšlený jedním chlápakem co se jmenoval Malcolm co na nich chtěl vydělat taky jenom prachy ale možná to jsou jen komančský kecy ale fakt je jak řek Helmut že by se ty navoněný pankáči z Anglie posrali kdyby žili opravdovej pank v ČSSR kde no future je fakt no future. Ale to nic nemění na tom že tam všichni pojedeme tak jsem si začala pouštět Tótny a umírám protože už chci aby bylo září. Chci chci chci. A hlavně ten koncert je 15. září. To mám narozeniny a bude mi 17 takže dárek největší. Danke všem už teď.”
― Jaroslav Rudiš, Konec punku v Helsinkách

P.G. Wodehouse
“For years Angus McAllister had set before himself as his earthly goal the construction of a gravel path through the Castle’s famous yew alley. For years he had been bringing the project to the notice of his employer, though in anyone less whiskered the latter’s unconcealed loathing would have caused embarrassment. And now, it seemed, he was at it again.

'Gravel path!' Lord Emsworth stiffened through the whole length of his stringy body. Nature, he had always maintained, intended a yew alley to be carpeted with a mossy growth. And, whatever Nature felt about it, he personally was dashed if he was going to have men with Clydeside accents and faces like dissipated potatoes coming along and mutilating that lovely expanse of green velvet. 'Gravel path, indeed! Why not asphalt? Why not a few hoardings with advertisements of liver pills and a filling station? That’s what the man would really like.'

Lord Emsworth felt bitter, and when he felt bitter he could be terribly sarcastic.

'Well, I think it is a very good idea,' said his sister. 'One could walk there in wet weather then. Damp moss is ruinous to shoes.'

Lord Emsworth rose. He could bear no more of this. He left the table, the room, and the house, and, reaching the yew alley some minutes later, was revolted to find it infested by Angus McAllister in person. The head-gardener was standing gazing at the moss like a high priest of some ancient religion about to stick the gaff into the human sacrifice.

'Morning, McAllister,' said Lord Emsworth, coldly.

'Good morrrrning, your lorrudsheep.'

There was a pause. Angus McAllister, extending a foot that looked like a violin-case, pressed it on the moss. The meaning of the gesture was plain. It expressed contempt, dislike, a generally anti-moss spirit; and Lord Emsworth, wincing, surveyed the man unpleasantly through his pince-nez. Though not often given to theological speculation, he was wondering why Providence, if obliged to make head-gardeners, had found it necessary to make them so Scotch. In the case of Angus McAllister, why, going a step farther, have made him a human being at all? All the ingredients of a first-class mule simply thrown away. He felt that he might have liked Angus McAllister if he had been a mule.

'I was speaking to her leddyship yesterday.'

'Oh?'

'About the gravel path I was speaking to her leddyship.'

'Oh?'

'Her leddyship likes the notion fine.'

'Indeed! Well——'

Lord Emsworth’s face had turned a lively pink, and he was about to release the blistering words which were forming themselves in his mind when suddenly he caught the head-gardener’s eye and paused. Angus McAllister was looking at him in a peculiar manner, and he knew what that look meant. Just one crack, his eye was saying—in Scotch, of course—just one crack out of you and I tender my resignation. And with a sickening shock it came home to Lord Emsworth how completely he was in this man’s clutches.

He shuffled miserably. Yes, he was helpless. Except for that kink about gravel paths, Angus McAllister was a head-gardener in a thousand, and he needed him. He could not do without him. Filled with the coward rage that dares to burn but does not dare to blaze, Lord Emsworth coughed a cough that was undisguisedly a bronchial white flag.

'I’ll—er—I’ll think it over, McAllister.'

'Mphm.'

'I have to go to the village now. I will see you later.'

'Mphm.'

'Meanwhile, I will—er—think it over.'

'Mphm.”
― P.G. Wodehouse, Lord Emsworth Acts for the Best

“PREPOSITIONS
219. Prepositions were not originally distinguished from Adverbs in form or meaning, but have become specialized in use. They developed comparatively late in the history of language. In the early stages of language development the cases alone were sufficient to indicate the sense, but, as the force of the case-endings weakened, adverbs were used for greater precision (cf. § 338). These adverbs, from their habitual association with particular cases, become Prepositions; but many retained also their independent functions as adverbs.

Most prepositions are true case-forms: as, the comparative ablatives extrā, īnfrā, suprā (for †exterā, †īnferā, †superā), and the accusatives circum, cōram, cum (cf. § 215). Circiter is an adverbial formation from circum (cf. § 215. b N.); praeter is the comparative of prae, propter of prope.[1] Of the remainder, versus is a petrified nominative (participle of vertō; adversus is a compound of versus; trāns is probably an old present participle (cf. in-trā-re); while the origin of the brief forms ab, ad, dē, ex, ob, is obscure and doubtful.

[1] The case-form of these prepositions in -ter is doubtful.”
― J. B. Greenough Joseph Henry Allen, Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar

Moses I. Finley
“Neither in Greek nor in Latin was there a word with which to express the general notion of 'labour' or the concept of labour 'as a general social function.' The nature and conditions of labour in antiquity precluded the emergence of such general ideas, as of the idea of a working class. 'Men never rest from toil and sorrow by day, and from perishing by night,' said Hesiod (Works and Days 176-8). That is a descriptive statement, a statement of fact, not of ideology; so is the conclusion, that it is therefore better to toil than to perish, and better still to turn to the labour of slaves if one can. But the world was not one of toil and sorrow for everybody, and there lay a difficulty. The expulsion from Eden had the saving feature that it embraced all mankind, and hence, though it linked work with sin and punishment, it did not degrade labour as such. A fate which is everyone's may be tragic, it cannot be shameful. Sin can be washed away, not natural moral inferiority. Aristotle's theory of natural slavery in the first book of the Politics was an extreme position, but those who did not accept it merely turned the doctrine round: men who engaged in the mean employments or in the slavish conditions of employment were made inferior by their work. Either way there was no consolation.

All this, it will be objected, is based on the views of the upper classes and their spokesmen among the intellectuals, not on the views of those who worked but were voiceless. But they were not wholly so. They expressed themselves in their cults, for example, and it is to be noted that though Hephaestus (the Roman Vulcan), the craftsman among the gods, was in a sense a patron of the crafts, and especially of the metallurgists, he was an inferior deity in heaven and he received little formal worship and few temples on earth. The most 'popular' classical cults were the ecstatic ones, particularly that of Dionysus/Bacchus, the god of intoxication (in more senses than one). Through Dionysus one did not celebrate toil, one obtained release from it. Those who worked also expressed their views in their demands for land, already noticed, and in their failure to ally themselves with the slaves on those relatively rare occasions when the latter revolted.”
― Moses I. Finley, Ancient Economy

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