Interpreting a sentence

[Jonathan Lighter]

The Enquirer will pay me plenty.

JL

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 1:11 PM, George Thompson <george.thompson at nyu.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Interpreting a sentence
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>
> It certainly isn't my impression that the criminal law of 17th C England
> was "lax", or that the New Englanders devised a criminal law that was more
> draconian than back home.
> Nonetheless, I would interpret the quoted sentence as stating that the
> criminal law of NE was intended to be more severe than that of the old
> country.
>
> As far as the Purritans being considered extremists, they were indeed so
> considered, by me, Ben Jonson and many other figures of note, but not for
> their code of criminal law.  What the writer of the quoted sentence meant to
> say there I won't guess at.
>
> Is the writer thinking of the scarlet-letter business?  That wasn't found
> in England, I suppose, but I doubt that my great-to-the-7th grandads
> supposed that England was soft on fornication & adultery.    (1/4 of my
> ancestry is old-time New Englander)  The law's take on theft can't have been
> different, much.  How about gambling, drunkenness & other victimless crimes?
>  Leaving aside what the aristocracy was able to get away with, of course.
>
> One of my very-great-grandmas had an out-of-wedlock baby, and seems not to
> have suffered unduly for it.  (This last is a family scandal that we have
> kept hidden for 325 years -- I hope that you all will not let it go beyond
> the circle here.)
>
> GAT
>
> George A. Thompson
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at att.net>
> Date: Tuesday, February 8, 2011 11:34 am
> Subject: Interpreting a sentence
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>
> > I am reading the following sentence (in email, so I excuse the typo):
> >
> > >Criminal law in New England was created on the whole by people who
> > >had found life in Europe too lax, but were considered extremists,
> > >and persecuted, by their contemmporaries [sic] Europeans.
> >
> > Is it fair to assume that "criminal law in New England was created on
> > the whole by people who had found life in Europe too lax"  is the
> > opinion of the writer of this sentence, rather than the opinion of
> > "their contemporaneous Europeans"?
> >
> > Is it fair to assume that the "criminal law was founded ..." part
> > implies the belief (whether held by the writer or held by the
> > contemporaneous Europeans) that the New Englanders created a criminal
> > law that was severe in order to overcome the laxness they saw in Europe?
> >
> > Joel
> >
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