For this week's "Word of the Week"*, here's a common phrase I encountered a few days ago, while reading a sermon by St. Augustine, on the feast day of Saints Perpetua and Felicity. The quote, translated by Edmond Hill, O.P. in 1994, is
and in order that this bumper crop of Christian peoples might spring up like sprouting seeds, they watered the earth with their blood
Now, is it just me, or does the phrase "bumper crop" seem out of place in the musings of a 3rd Century scholar? The incongruity of the phrase sent me to researching it's etymology from various sites across the web.
First noted use is in the 17th Century, when "bumper" referred to a brimming-full cup; within the next hundred years it began to mean something large; by the mid 1800s, it was most often used in the term "bumper crop", rather than as a stand-alone word.
There's my answer, then. . . The translator, in his endeavor to make the sermon accessible for everyone, threw in a phrase that doesn't feel appropriate. I would love to know what the original phrase was in Latin, and other ways it might have been rendered.
How about you? Did you run across any interesting words or phrases this past week?
*"Word of the Week" is a meme hosted by the Plain-Spoken Pen on Mondays in which we share a word that we find entertaining, enlightening, edifying, or just plain fun to say!
