Re: CHAT: Shrive (was CHAT: Return of the Sal)

At 10:15 am -0500 24/3/00, John Cowan wrote:
>Raymond Brown wrote:
>
>> [intransitive]  'to to receive abosolution' or 'to make confession'.
>
>This sense surprises me, though Merriam-Webster backs you up; I have
>only seen "to be shriven" in this sense, as in Shakespeare.  Spenser
>(the poet) used "shrive" intransitively in the non-specific sense
>"to hear confessions".
I've only heard it used - and occasionally used it myself - in the passive
- to be shriven/ to get shriven = to make confession & receive absolution.
This usage is certainly obselescent but not entirely obsolete.

I think the active 'shrive' (present) & 'shrove' (past) are now quite
obsolete (tho I'd be happy to be be proved wrong  :)

[.....]
>
>The traditional English meal on Shrove Tuesday was pancakes, perhaps to
>consume the eggs that were once forbidden food during Lent.
It is indeed - the custom is still string even among the non-church-going
population.   But it wasn't, as I understand it, so much the eggs that were
forbidden but that this was a general fry-up of sweatmeats, which one would
deny oneself during Lent, in batter.  Now it's only the batter fried and
then, according to modern custom, sprinkled with sugar & lemon juice.
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At 1:18 pm -0500 24/3/00, Roger Mills wrote:
>and don't forget "short shrift"!

Indeed not.

'Shrift' originally meant "a prescribed penance"; it then came to mean
"confession" or "absolution".   The "short shrift" was the short time for
confession given to a condemned person before s/he was executed.

Ray.


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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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