Buxom & Bonny In Bed & At Board

“We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.”

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

We ate, we drank, we slept, we loved. If you can keep it that simple, thanks be to God.

The quote makes me think of my wonderful wife and our wonderful marriage. Of course, it sums up what we do so well, but it’s also reminiscent of my wife’s own motto for marriage. I also like that the quote includes the word “cheaply”, which is a key part of our marital glue.

My wife’s motto in marriage also puts it neatly. “Sex, eat, sleep.”

When I first got married a pastor who was mentoring me (a Baptist who made the mistake of introducing me to Calvin) gave me his most important piece of advice. “Keep the pantry full. No matter how hard things get, make sure you keep the pantry full.” And there is immense wisdom in this. When Christians run in to trouble in their marriages they often want a hyper-spiritual meta-solution, instead of humbling themselves and taking care of practical things, like eating well, and drinking well, and sleeping well and warm together.

_________________________________________________

According to John Thrupp in The Anglo-Saxon Home: A History of the Domestic Institutions and Customs of England From the Fifth to the Eleventh Centuries, wives promised to be “bonny and buxom at bed and at board”.

Everything one needs to be bonny and buxom.

I’m going to talk about how awesome that is for husbands. If you don’t like that you can go read my moralizing for husbands while you suck on a lemon.

The bride’s vow, closely related to today’s traditional vows, is “I take thee John to be my wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer and poorer, in sickness and health, to be bonny and buxom in bed and at board till death do us part, and thereto I plight thee my troth.”

A “troth”, by the way, is pledged loyalty and faithfulness, as in “betrothal”.

The groom’s vow was briefer, less beautiful, and less alliterative. “I take thee Alice to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold, at bed and at board, for fairer for fouler, for better or for worse, in sickness or in health, till death us do part.” It’s interesting to note as an aside here that the groom’s vow contains a promise to stay with her even if she gets old and wrinkly and ugly.

Just saying the words of the wife’s vow is a pleasure. They’re so bouncy! Try it, out loud: “Bonny and buxom in bed and at board.” Or maybe “Sassy and sweet in sack and at seat.” Sweet and bouncy…and bouncy goes so well with “buxom.” We all know what we think first when we hear the word “buxom”.

I’ll bet you don’t think “obedient and tractable”. Yep. That’s the first definition at Merriam-Webster, although it’s plainly labeled as obsolete. The word is from Middle English buxsum, from Old English būhsum; akin to Old English būgan to bend, or bow.

1. obsolete a: obedient, tractable b: offering little resistance : flexible <wing silently the buxom air — John Milton>
2. archaic: full of gaiety
3. vigorously or healthily plump; specifically: full-bosomed

Yes, every man reading this had already thought “full-bosomed”, but that’s the last thing mentioned by dictionary nerds, who are men we should all strive to be more like.

Every young man wants a wife who is flexible.

The oath the bride is giving is one of Christian submission to her husband. The most awesome thing about that is that we’re talking about cheerful obedience. You could even put a hyphen in there and turn that into one word. So we’re talking about cheerful-obedience, a much bally-hooed but seldom seen Christian quality. Buxom meant obedient and flexible, but it must have even then been a word charged with good cheer, since it followed “bonny” so closely, and since it evolved to mean “gaiety” and “bouncing big breasts”.

So Christian wives are called to cheerful obedience in bed and at the table. There are a lot of distractions, and lots of other work, but that’s the core of practical marriage. Thank God for this every day, o you husbands. And pray that you be made worthy.

Dialogue Toward Having a Baby, Illustrated By Children’s Books

The discussion began when I said, “There’s a wocket in my pocket.”

So Kimberly shouted throughout the house, “Bedtime for little bears!”

That being taken care of, I said, “Come on over, baby, and hop on pop!”

But she wanted to know, “Where’s walrus?”

So I told her, “Watch me grow, Kitten.”

She responded, “That is a very hungry caterpillar.”

That’s when I showed her the “Sweethearts of Rhythm”.

Kimberly announced she would recite aloud from “Falling Up”.

I said, “And that’s the wonderful way babies are made.”

To which she replied, “We’re having a home birth.”

And that was pretty much all the talking we did.

The Truth About the Trenta

Remember when Starbucks came out with the trenta size last year? It’s huge, huge, huge. Two grandes in one cup. They only use it for tea and water-based drinks, because the prospect of that much frappuccino or milk seems unholy even to Starbucks.

It was even claimed that the Trenta was unnatural and unholy because it is larger than the human stomach.

Oh, yeah? If that’s the case, what’s with this awesomeness? (This was taken over a year ago, but I just got it.)

 

The Greatest Disaster of the 19th Century

“The greatest disaster of the nineteenth century was this: that men began to use the word ‘spiritual’ as the same as the word ‘good.’ They thought that to grow in refinement and uncorporeality was to grow in virtue. When scientific evolution was announced, some feared that it would encourage mere animality. It did worse: it encouraged mere spirituality. It taught men to think that so long as they were passing from the ape they were going to the angel. But you can pass from the ape and go to the devil.”

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Academia Confirms: Martin Luther Loved Poop

Fo’ shizzle.

Danielle Mead Skjelver wants to tell you all about it. You can find an entire paper authored by her on Luther’s scatological expressions at German Hercules: The Impact of Scatology on the Definition of Martin Luther as a Man 1483-1546.

Apparently in medieval and Reformation Germany, poop jokes made you more manly.

Introduction: The writings of Martin Luther are among the most studied in the world. With words sublime, he gave the Christian God back to the common man, and yet Luther also spoke with shocking cruelty and vulgarity. Martin Luther’s employment of vulgarity, and specifically scatological vulgarity, in his writings and speech has drawn criticism, embarrassment, and accusations of psychological instability. But there was power in coarse language, for Martin Luther’s combative use of scatology defined him as a virile male in sixteenth century Germany. Brash and full of bravado, the scatology of Martin Luther lent him the appearance of fearlessness. Scatology in many societies is associated with the beer hall and the military, two bastions of masculinity (analogous to today’s ‘locker-room talk’). Even among elites in the Europe of Luther’s day, scatology was not unusual. This was particularly true in German speaking lands. In a time of strong proto-nationalism, his combative and demeaning brand of scatology, which was leveled against not only a spiritual but also a foreign enemy in the Papacy, secured for him the definition of virile German male. In spite of his emaciated condition from years of fasting, and later in life in spite of corpulence, and even in spite of his public proclamations that he proudly helped his wife wash diapers, Luther was ever the man in the eyes of both allies and enemies. His virility was largely the product of his aggressive use of scatological language, for in demeaning his enemies, Luther diminished their virility. His adversaries, however, vilified his character in such a way that their attacks emphasized Luther’s masculinity.