OT: Well, that's settled.

[Wilson Gray]

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 8:33 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: OT: Well, that's settled.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> IOW, f2f confession isn't everything, it's the *only* thing.
>
> LH
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org