| | 1 | Author: | Beerbohm, Max, Sir, 1872-1956 | Requires cookie* | | | Title: | "Hosts and Guests"  | | | | Published: | 1999 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Text collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | BEAUTIFULLY vague though the English language is, with its
meanings merging into one another as softly as the facts of
landscape in the moist English climate, and much addicted though
we always have been to ways of compromise, and averse from sharp
hard logical outlines, we do not call a host a guest, nor a guest a
host. The ancient Romans did so. They, with a language that was
as lucid as their climate and was a perfect expression of the sharp
hard logical outlook fostered by that climate, had but one word for
those two things. Nor have their equally acute descendants done
what might have been expected of them in this matter.
Hôte and ospite and huesped are as
mysteriously equivocal as hospes. By weight of all this
authority I find myself being dragged to the conclusion that a host
and a guest must be the same thing, after all. Yet in a dim and
muzzy way, deep down in my breast, I feel sure that they are
different. Compromise, you see, as usual. I take it that strictly the
two things are one, but that our division of them is yet
another instance of that sterling common sense by which, etc., etc. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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