Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

* The papers always referred to the strikers as foreign; as Chinamen, Indians, Arabs, and Africans. (Never mind Professor Craft.) They were never Oxfordians, they were never Englishmen, they were travellers from abroad who had taken advantage of Oxford’s good graces, and who now held the nation hostage. Babel had become synonymous with foreign, and this was very strange, because before this, the Royal Institute of Translation had always been regarded as a national treasure, a quintessentially English institution.

But then England, and the English language, had always been more indebted to the poor, the lowly, and the foreign than it cared to admit. The word vernacular came from the Latin verna, meaning ‘house slave’; this emphasized the nativeness, the domesticity of the vernacular language. But the root verna also indicated the lowly origins of the language spoken by the powerful; the terms and phrases invented by slaves, labourers, beggars, and criminals – the vulgar cants, as it were – had infiltrated English until they became proper. And the English vernacular could not properly be called domestic either, because English etymology had roots all over the world. Almanacs and algebra came from Arabic; pyjamas from Sanskrit, ketchup from Chinese, and paddies from Malay. It was only when elite England’s way of life was threatened that the true English, whoever they were, attempted to excise all that had made them.

* ‘Let them hate, so long as they fear.’

* But that was part of the genius of Babel. By keeping them isolated, by distracting them with coursework so that they never had the chance to form bonds outside their cohort, it had cut off all avenues towards meaningful solidarity, had made them believe for so long that they were the only ones caught in their particular web.

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* The Peterloo Massacre of 1819, the largest immediate effect of which was to provoke a government crackdown on radical organizing. The cavalry rushed a crowd agitating for parliamentary representation, crushing men, women, and children alike under their hooves. Eleven died.

* ‘Arm’d with thy sad last gift – the pow’r to die! / Thy shafts, stern fortune, now I can defy.’ (Thomas Day and John Bicknell, 1775)

* In (the white Englishwoman) Aphra Behn’s 1688 romantic novel Oroonoko, the African prince Oroonoko kills his lover Imoinda to save her from being violated by the English military forces against whom they are revolting. Oroonoko is later captured, bound to a post, quartered, and dismembered. Oroonoko, and its theatrical adaptation by Thomas Southerne, were received at the time as a great romance.

* ‘With one hand he will make an open path for freedom.’

* ‘Thus, thus it helps to go beneath the shadows.’