Mind your language
`AT THE end of little more than a cen- tury after his death St Thomas Becket is inscribed on 29 December in an Arme- nian synaxary.' Well, who'd have thought it? And do you know what a synaxary is? I didn't.
The word does not figure in the two- volume Shorter Oxford Dictionary, indeed it is a rare bird, for the only cita- tion to the root-form synaxis given in the big Oxford English Dictionary is from the very author I had read it in, Alban Butler, author of the Lives of the Saints.
This is all on a higher level than the Daily Mail's speculation that the Princess of Wales is seeking the path to Rome. That farrago contained a phrase which causes pain to pedants like us: `Here was a bizarre twist in sequence of events that seriously begs the question: Is Diana considering joining the Catholic Church?' If the authors don't know that this is a misuse of the phrase beg the question, they should. It is a term from logic and means the same as petitio principii, a fallacy in which they seero skilled. It differs from ignoratio elenchi, for which they also seem to have a weakness.
Oh, by the way, a synaxary is a collec- tion of saints' lives read at public wor- ship. How different from the Daily Mail.
Dot Wordsworth
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