On Saturnalia
ONE of the bothers of writing is that words carry about upon their backs nowadays a great pack of past meanings and derivations, and that—particularly to-day—no word is standing still as it were and meaning something once and for all which a plain man can say without being laughed at for ignorance or for affectation. For instance, Saturnalia. To one man it means a certain bundle of ritual many centuries dead, common to a particular district of Italy and practised in midwinter. To another man it means a lot of poor people having an exaggerated beanfeast and thereby annoying the rich people. But it does not mean either of these things to the plain man. It means to the plain man occasion and specific occasion for turning things upside down and getting breathing space for a while from the crushing order of this world. That is what "Saturnalia" means to the ordinary user of the word, and note, he has no other word by which to express the idea—so thoroughly has the thing died out since modern English was formed. I suppose the nearest word for it in English—when such feasts were still known in England—was the vague
38
