Painting vs. gilding the lily

[nancylebov]

I'm currently in a discussion in rec.arts.sf.written about whether it's important to say "painting the lily" (the actual Shakespeare quote) rather than the more common (in both senses) "gilding the lily".

Do you care whether people use the original quote? Have you ever been around people who did?

Comments

[avram]

I have a hard time seeing how such a thing can be “important” unless you’re maybe you’re on a job interview applying for a position as an English Lit. scholar.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I'm arguing with someone who's very committed to "correct" language. I think his opinion on the matter is wildly disprortionate, but I'm curious about whether it's shared, even in a milder form.

[snippy]

I think if you used the original quote in a general reference (rather than as an explanation, here), most people will think you got it wrong.

I do get a completely different meaning from the two phrases, but then "painting" isn't used to mean "put on makeup" these days. It would seem less weird to see "farding the lily" even though farding is archaic.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the new word. Do you have any idea when it went out of use? I'm not sure that I've seen it before, though it might be lurking somewhere in E.R. Eddison.

Fard can also mean
(Arabic, 'alone'). One who, in Islam, is filled with the realization of truth and illumination on his own-i.e. without belonging to a community or *Sufi order. It is even possible that such a person might not belong to a religion derived from revelation at all, receiving the gift directly from God.

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<a=href"www.bloomington.in.us/~okolicko/definitions.html">') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

Thanks for the new word. Do you have any idea when it went out of use? I'm not sure that I've seen it before, though it might be lurking somewhere in E.R. Eddison.

Fard can also mean
(Arabic, 'alone'). One who, in Islam, is filled with the realization of truth and illumination on his own-i.e. without belonging to a community or *Sufi order. It is even possible that such a person might not belong to a religion derived from revelation at all, receiving the gift directly from God.
<a=href"www.bloomington.in.us/~okolicko/definitions.html">link</a>

However, <a=href"http://www.wordiq.com/definition/List_of_Islamic_terms_in_Arabic.html">link</a> has it that
fard means "obligatory, you have to do it. praying 5 times a day is fard".

That's a nice icon you've got there, with a longer loop than most--did you have to do anything special to have that many images?

[snippy]

I got that word from the SCA via my husband, who was active in it when he lived on the east coast. I'm not sure when it went out of use, but my boss has a compact Oxford and I'll check when I get to work.

Your html is broken on the links you gave. After the "a" you need a space instead of an equals sign, then after the "href" you need the equals sign before the quote marks.

The icon...I didn't make it! polyfrog had it, and I asked him if I could steal it, and he said sure. It's a capture from a tv show.

And in case you don't recognize me, I know you from rasf, where snippy is my part of my email address.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks--it was obviously excessive optimism when when I thought I could do the tags from memory. How do I access a comment to edit it?

[snippy]

According to the FAQ, you can't edit comments. You could copy the text to a text editor, delete the comment, then re-comment with the corrected text; but if it were me I'd skip it. Anybody that wants to follow the links can still do so.

[snippy]

Okay, I checked the Compact Oxford. It's listed as Obs. (obsolete) but doesn't say when it went out of use; the first use is 1450. There's a secondary definition meaning "to embellish or gloss over".

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

It depends on if you want to be pedantic or understood.

If you're quoting Shakespeare, then use it properly. If you're making a reference to doing something un-needed, I'd go with the common (if wrong) reference.

[fixx.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure that the two sayings necessarily mean the same thing. Whereas "gilding they lilly" says "trying to make the lilly more beautiful" when it is not necessary, where as "painting the lilly" I might interpret as trying to replicate the beauty of a lilly by painting a portrait of it, whether or not that was shakespeare's intent.

Let us not forget that the meaning is probably also lost in translation from English to other languages and that we as Americans don't actually speak English anyway. Recently I was having a loosely related discussion regarding English language, vs American, vs AIM and by that I refer to the abbreviations you find in IM's like 4 for "for" and U for YOU and Tonite for Tonight etc.

I argued that it is difficult for me to debate what I still consider to be "understandable" language when we as Americans don't even speak "Proper" English anyway.

I should add that growing up I commuted between the US and England and frequently lost points on spelling tests for using the British spellings of words... worse yet, one year in the US I had an English teacher who was from England and for the first 3 months of that year I got really good scores on spelling tests, until one or more parents got on her case about marking their kids spellings as wrong.

Hi Nancy!

[wolfdancer.livejournal.com]

Welcom to the borg colective!
You have jsut been asmulateded.
Wave by by to the like that you once knew. The large sucking sound is the is LJ drawing you in, and the rest of your free time going away.

Re: Hi Nancy!

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

No question about that--I hadn't realized what a temptation to more writing, more ambitious writing (a topic which I'm going to write something about) and more reading lj could be.

Fortunately, I've been wasting enough time on tetris that I can free some of it up.