Transcript of “Refect on This Monastic Lingo”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. From time to time, we ask you to share the specialized vocabulary that you use in your work environment, your hobbies, those places you spend most of your time.
And that prompted an email from Brother Abraham Newsome. He’s a monk at the St. Gregory’s Abbey in Three Rivers, Michigan. That’s a Benedictine monastery in the Episcopal Church.
And he shares some language that gives you kind of a sense of the fabric of daily life there.
And there are three terms that I want to mention.
The first one is corporate prayer.
Now, that might conjure a particular image in your mind.
But in a monastery, the monks gather for seven times a day to pray as a group.
And that’s called corporate prayer because they’re praying as a body, as opposed to the private prayer they do when they’re going about their daily chores.
And they rotate the assignments doing those chores, and they also take turns being the cantor in the monastery church.
And the person is assigned to be the cantor for a week, and therefore that person is called the hebdomadary.
That word ultimately comes from the Greek hebdomos, which means seven, because it’s seven days in a week that the person is the cantor.
And from that same root comes the French word for a weekly magazine, hebdomadaire, or just hebdo, H-E-B-D-O.
So hebdomadaire is another word that they use at the monastery.
And finally, the monastic dining hall is called the refectory.
Not reflectory, but refectory.
And that comes from a Latin term for a place of restoration.
To reflect is an old word that means to refresh oneself or another person with food or drink.
And one other thing I want to add about that is that meals at the monastery are silent, but each week a different person is assigned to read aloud a book while other people eat.
And it’s a really cool practice.
Their reading list is really extensive and wide-ranging.
I want to read all the books on the list that he sent me because they include things like a history of women in astronomy and space exploration, weapons of math destruction, how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy, and Yiddish, a biography of a language, books by Atul Gawande, the surgeon who writes for The New Yorker.
It’s just, I think that would be such a lovely thing.
You know, you have all this meditative time at the monastery doing your chores, and then you gather together with other people and you sit there and eat, but you listen to somebody read a wonderful book.
Isn’t that cool?
I love that.
Yeah, I feel like you and I are this close to joining a monastery or a nunnery or any place that will have us and give us silence and a bookster read.
Yeah, or at least drop by for a couple of meals.
Right, absolutely.
Is refectory related to confection or confectionary?
Well, it goes back to, as I said, Latin for to refresh oneself.
And if you go back to the original root of that, the F-E-C-T, it’s related to all kinds of words having to do with making.
So, yeah, confection is pulling stuff together and making it.
Manufacture is making stuff by hand.
Yeah, there’s a whole family of words associated with that.
But in any case, I’m really grateful to you, Brother Abraham, for sharing this with us.
And we’d love to hear more from other folks.
And thank you, Brother Abraham, for sharing that reading list.
I’m with Martha.
That’s an astonishing reading list, and it’ll take me the rest of my life to work my way through it, but I’m going to try.
We’d love to hear what you’re reading, and we’d love to hear the language of your trade profession or hobby.
Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us another way.
There are lots of ways on our website at waywordradio.org.
