Mind your language
‘It is,’ Tony Blair said, ‘a word, I think, that members of the public readily know and understand and juries will understand.’ He was talking about glorification.
I suppose people know it when they see it, but they hardly use it. For the past 200 years glorified has been used sarcastically. About 100 years ago, Mary Kingsley, the African explorer, wrote, ‘It is a real island of a rocky nature, not a glorified sandbank.’ In the same way you could say, ‘He’s a real terrorist, not a glorified protester wearing a fake suicide-bomber outfit.’ If the Prime Minister hopes to see the word usefully employed in criminal prosecutions, one wonders if he has ever read the dialogue between Alice and Humpty Dumpty in Through the LookingGlass: ‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory”,’ Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knockdown argument for you!”’ ‘But “glory” doesn’t mean “a nice knockdown argument”,’ Alice objected.
‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’ Mr Blair would audition well for the Humpty Dumpty role.
Glory has long been used of God. At church people say ‘Glory be to the Father’ etc., or ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’. The usage is parallel to ‘Blessed be God’. What is being offered to God here?
The glorification of God seems the proper work of creatures, conscious or not. Glory as an aspect of God’s goodness is reflected in his creation. This is a theme of Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God.’ Creatures give glory back merely by existing. Their intrinsic glory is God’s extrinsic glory. Will that help the court?
Old Glory as a name for the US flag was apparently coined by Captain William Driver, the master of a ship called the Charles Doggett, from Salem, Massachusetts. In 1831 he was moving survivors of the Bounty mutiny from Tahiti to Pitcairn Island, and on his return the women of Salem gave him a flag. Seeing it break out from the masthead he exclaimed, ‘There goes old Glory!’ It was a funny thing to say, but then glory is a funny concept.
Dot Wordsworth
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