11.02.08
Ta-Da!
I am much accomplished! I finished my psalms last night and proofed them and uploaded them today. I also finished getting all of my stuff uploaded to eCrater yesterday. So I had a productive day yesterday, even before you take into account that I went to the grocery store, the library and I opened a new bank account.
In addition to picking up my usual collection of books on business, I took out Ben Franklin’s autobiography. The book I got a few weeks ago on Ben Franklin’s principals for business made me interested in reading the autobiography for myself. I’m finding it pretty interesting, although it’s not exactly fast reading. For one thing, the editor has left the original 18th century spellings, which are not as difficult as some I’ve seen from that time, but they make it interesting. Also included are contractions favored at the time. It is not generally known that contractions were exceedingly popular in the middle ages and they have been slowly dying out since, until we are left with only a few standard ones. The man who did the “Connections” series pointed out in one episode that medieval people would have found our tendency to write out complete words all the time very odd. Apparently there were several forms of short hand in the middle ages. This makes a good deal of sense if you consider that paper was made from animal skins (parchment) and was expensive. If you were to write anything, you would want to write as much as possible in as small a space as possible. Apparently in Franklin’s time it was not uncommon to shorten the suffix “ed” to just “’d”. So that “walked” becomes “walk’d”. Another one I just ran across shortened “friends” to “frds” with the “ds” written in superscript. You most commonly see this sort of thing on tombstones, where “William” will be shortened to “Wm” with the “m” often in superscript. Hey, when you’re paying per letter to carve that headstone….
I’ve watched several documentaries on Franklin because I’ve been a fan of his since I was a kid. I am glad that I have picked up his autobiography, because I’m definitely getting a different interpretation of him than some of the people who have previously commented on him. I found the same thing happening with Margery Kempe. Margery Kempe—whom I one day hope to introduce to my website through a lecture piece—was a 14th century woman given to ecstatic religious visions and conversations. Even in her own time, people didn’t know quite what to think of her. Some people loved her and thought her a saint, while others reviled her and tried to charge her with heresy. Modern scholars often take a biased view against her, I have found, thinking that she was suffering from some sort of schizophrenia. They greatly color retellings of her life with their own biases against her. When I actually read what she had dictated about her own life, I found her to be much more mild, sane and rational than anyone had described her. Both cases thus proving that it’s better to go to the source than to take someone’s word on it.
