OT: Well, that's settled.

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:08 AM -0500 2/12/11, Wilson Gray wrote:
>On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 8:33 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>>
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>>  Sender: ?  ?  ?  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>  Poster: ?  ?  ?  Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>>  Subject: ?  ?  ? Re: OT: Well, that's settled.
>>
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>>  IOW, f2f confession isn't everything, it's the *only* thing.
>>
>>  LH

Just to restore the context of my remark, I was responding above to
your earlier attribution of the remark about the inadmissibility of
iPhone confessions to "Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi" in
alluding (cryptically, I confess) to (Mon?)Signor Lombardi's
non-cousin Vince, who was a good Catholic but not from St. Louis, so
you never know.

LH

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>Well, it's only semi-f2f. Inside the box, there's always a screen that
>keeps the meet from being truly in-your-face. However, the Jesuits -
>in Saint Louis, at least - have/had? a custom in which the ritual
>is/was? truly up close and all-too-intensely personal, for graduating
>fourth-year students. And, of course, you really have to say exactly
>what the alleged sins are. And lying in the confessional is an
>abomination and an act of sacrilege. (How do they know that you're
>lying? They *don't* know. *You* know. "Let your conscience be your
>guide." Very few people are up for committing sacrilege in order to
>escape what is, "in the great scheme of things," to coin a phrase, a
>triviality.)
>Excruciating! Even though the ritual took only a couple of minutes of
>real time, it felt as though it took a couple of years off your life.
>(Like that first day of basic training/boot camp, it comes as a
>complete surprise, as when you discover what it really means to follow
>orders in the military, getting the first clue as to how it can be the
>case that an EM will obey a clearly-insane order.) If there'd been
>anything like that for the first-year students, either there would
>have been no graduating classes or the graduating classes would have
>consisted entirely of latter-day saints and sociopaths.
>
>--
>-Wilson
>---
>All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"--a strange complaint to
>come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>-Mark Twain
>
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