The font in Christ’s Chapel
The other thing our idealized onlooker is to attend to is ANOM ĒMA. The first letter is an ‘alpha’ privative, which negates, like the English morphemes in-, un-, and -less. The meaning of -NOM Ē MA is known only from its plural form, which the lexicographer Hesychius, perhaps of the fifth century of our era, defines as DIKAI Ō MATA. A DIKAI ŌMA is an ‘act of right.’ ‘Tran s gression of the law’ gets ANOM Ē MA nicely in English, for it specifies wrongful activity. But what law? God’s law? The transgression of which would be sin. Or canon law? We are, after all, within the confines of a sanctuary. Has the Church of England, though, appropriated a saying that perhaps predates Christendom by 500 years? Was NIP/SON ANOM Ē MAM Ē MONAN OP/SIN first said in classical Athens, when the Greek language flourished as never before or afterward? Could a distinction then have been drawn between religious law on the one hand, and civil/criminal cases as we know them? Law is deeply embedded in the culture in which it evolves. Words based in -NOM in the first instance speak of norms, of habitual practice, usage, and custom. Might we have here reference not so much to ‘high crimes’ as to ‘misdemeanours’? There are frequent compounds in English – the malefactor is guilty of malfeasance, to say nothing of nonfeasance and misfeasance, and misconduct as well – that take pains to cast action in the worst light. And in this injunction the ‘defendant’s’ anti - social (mis)behaviour is taken for granted rather than proven. I’d like to think that one is being cautioned to mend one’s ways, to rectify one’s public persona, should there be any failings. I’d like to be less harshly judgmental, while at the same time being vague about the infractions covered. I suggest a colloquial modern rendering of the first two words could be ‘Clean up your act’.
The two adverbs M Ē (‘not’) and MONAN ( ’only, alone’) conjoin to become, as it were, a different part of speech. ‘Not just’ (on which see below) is a roundabout way of saying ‘and’, a conjunction.
Provenience (how did we come to have this?)
Green writes that the inscription ‘probably originated from the font of the church of St. Sophia, Constantinople’ ( Guide , p. 10). I recall being told, decades ago, that it had been found engraved on a stone watering-trough in Turkey. These statements may be two ways of saying the same thing. Just as my birthplace is no longer called New Amsterdam, but is widely known as New York City, so St. Sophia, which was a church in Constantinople, subsequently became a mosque, and is now a secular museum in Istanbul. ‘Istanbul’, in Turkey, is in fact a Greek prepositional phrase (EIS T Ē N POL – ‘to the city) – so unsuccessful has nationalistic correctness been in expunging Greekness from the designation of the country’s megalopolis. But outside mosques one finds cisterns or water ta nks for ablution preceding prayers. The practice of wudu , or the removing of minor impurities, consists of washing the feet, hands, and face. How it came to Hagia Sophia is almost surely beyond ascertaining, a mystery for the ages. In the spring of 2017 I heard a tour guide in Crete rattle the saying off (even if he may have garbled it a bit), and it occurred to me that maybe every Greek schoolchild is familiar with it, rather as ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers’ stays with us from childhood in English- speaking countries. We don’t ask ‘Who was Peter Piper? A memorable vegetable gardener? How did he go about this remarkable horticultural feat (why weren’t they ‘pickling’ peppers?)? Isn’t this putting the cart before the horse?’ Well yes, but it’s just an illogical jingle, passed down for its catchy alliteration. Then too, there’s a name for the inverted order: hysteron proteron . (Among composers of words and their devotees there’s a term for every variation from the ordinary.) And sometimes technical terms seem to overlap. Thus the
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