Dionysus

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 09 Dec 2010, 17:50 · from 2010-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2010 09:50:42 -0800
Subject: (urth) Dionysus
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTi=uJqirb=oaXyyo5M0n6jOnt6YdVdpdo95eYdXv at mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTi=uJqirb=oaXyyo5M0n6jOnt6YdVdpdo95eYdXv at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <AANLkTinWEFYDf5prC_RxJc+Jo52y8iEmp6t0Ax-ZXH-1 at mail.gmail.com>

On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 9:46 AM, Andrew Mason
<andrew.mason53 at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>
>> So...we agree that he's is the god of the "vine", not just grape vines.
>> I do not believe specific species of vines mattered to Wolfe for this
>> association one little bit.
>
> I find that most improbable. The title 'god of the vine' is a
> translation of Greek and Latin phrases which referred to the grape
> vine. Dionysus was the god of wine and of grapes and so of the plant
> from which they come, the vine, in the historic sense of that term. He
> is not the god of climbing plants generally. (There seems to be a
> difference between British and American usage here. To me, 'vine'
> primarily means grape vine, and can by extension mean other plants
> that resemble it. I get the sense that to Americans it just means
> climbing plant, without grapes having any special precedence.
> According to the OED the wider sense is first attested in 1563, but
> doesn't become widespread until the 18th century, and is then
> distinctively American. )

But do recall, please, that Wolfe is an American writer. (I almost
wrote "an _essentially_ American writer," but realized that, while
that is my impression, I have no real data to back it up.) As such, he
might be expected to use "vine" in the American sense.

Against this, of course, is the fact that he is steeped in the Classics.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net