killing people and breaking things

[Jonathan Lighter]

>The perhaps-apocryphal "Kill them all! God/Allah will recognize his own!"

Caesarius of Heisterbach's _Dialogus Miraculorum_ of 1233 attributes the
"God" version to the Arnauld Amaury, Abbott of Citeaux, during the
Albigensian Crusade of 1209:

"Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt ejus."

Catchier in English.

JL

On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 7:37 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: killing people and breaking things
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 6:35 PM, Jonathan Lighter
> <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > "killing people and breaking things" (particularly in that
> > emotionally anticlimactic order)
>
> Reminds me of the drill sergeant's (in my day, "drill instructor" and
> "DI" were Marines-isms, not used in The War),
>
> [I'm going to start] kicking ass and taking names!
>
> I.e., first, punishment would be meted out universally. After that,
> the sergeant would concern himself with discovering the identity of
> the actual perpetrator(s) of the fuck-up.
>
> The perhaps-apocryphal "Kill them all! God/Allah will recognize his own!"
>
> and its variants may possibly be an extension, semantically, at least.
>
> --
> -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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