Gird Your Loins!

Stanley Tucci,
The Devil Wears Prada

A friend sent me a text the other day saying that she was about to gird her loins for a stressful upcoming event. I was delighted to see her use that particular phrase as it one of my favourites, probably makes my top twenty list, but it's rarely heard these days.  Growing up it was used around my house, introduced to me by my parents, but I doubt whether my children have ever used it or even know what the term means despite my usage of it. It has sadly fallen out of favour.  The phrase dates back from the bible when men were urged to gird themselves to get ready to run, fight or do heavy labour. This was usually achieved by a man pulling the front of his robe or tunic through his legs to the back and then wrapping two ends  around the front and tying them together in front of the hips. This also protected the manly bits, the loins, a tad more than the loose garment would.  Man up, get ready for battle! Gird your loins! Nowadays we are urged to put on our big girl panties and get the job done. Same idea but so much less oomph. I'd much rather gird my loins than put on some panties when I'm about to do battle, literally or metaphorically. Obviously gird is the root for  girdle, an undergarment that WOULD  provide loin protection in battle when you finally managed to get squeezed into it as opposed to the aforementioned panties!

Now this is protection!

The first time I can recall hearing the bible read aloud was in my public elementary school. I'm old enough to remember the days of the teacher reading a passage from the bible after the class had recited the Lord's Prayer. Every morning. My family is not religious and we didn't attend church so the reading of the bible was very exotic to me. I became fascinated with the language, not the actual stories or the intent but the language itself. I came across a bible at home when I was about ten or eleven and would stand in front of a mirror in private and practise reading the text aloud, playing teacher in my mind. All that "hath, thou and shalt" stuff, it was a foreign language that I could read! Fascinating. I would feel the same way much later, in high school when reading Shakespeare. The bible stories were so stern, so many admonishments, so much drama. The names were long, full of syllables that rolled off the tongue. Meshach, Shadrach, and Abednego are three that still spring to my lips whenever I want to summon them. I have no idea of their story, just the names remain.

My apologies to all that read and love the bible for its religious content, I mean no disrespect. But the language...it's so, well... biblical. An eye for an eye, the skin of my teeth, how the mighty have fallen,  they that take the sword shall perish by the sword, skin and bones. Awesome stuff.  At the same age I was reading the bible I was also reading novels voraciously, falling in love with the printed word and the worlds they created. My bible reading was short lived as I just couldn't get connected to the stories but my love of it's phrasing and vocabulary hasn't dimmed. And I know I'm not alone. One day years ago a friend was telling me about how angry she was with her husband over something. She was trying to find the right word to describe her emotion and she finally said that if she could have smote her husband on the spot she would have. Smote! Now there's a biblical word not used in everyday conversation anymore and I knew exactly what she meant. Her rage was so great she needed to reach back and find an Old Testament kind of feel to properly express herself.
The modern day evangelists are wonderful stage actors, in thrall to the dramatic language of the bible, it's rise and fall, it's thundering pronouncements, it's quiet beseeching. What actor wouldn't love these stories as their script?
So many phrases we use everyday have come from the bible, modernized to fit our speech patterns but the essential essence of them remains: forbidden fruit; go the extra mile; a drop in the bucket; a fly in the ointment; the blind leading the blind.  The list goes on. So though I am a heathen and my interest in the bible is strictly a selfish interest in its words and phrases I hope you won't judge me too harshly. If you do I shall have to gird my loins and prepare to defend myself.