Babel : Or the Necessity of Violence: an Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution (9780063021440)

* The Hermes Society also had connections with translation centres at universities in America, but these were even more repressive and dangerous than Oxford. For one, they were founded by slave owners, built and maintained with slave labour, and their endowments were sustained by the slave trade. For another, these American universities since their founding were preoccupied with the project of evangelizing, eradicating, and erasing Natives; the Indian College, founded 1655 at Harvard University, promised free tuition and housing to Native students who were required in turn to speak only in Latin and Greek, convert to Christianity, and either assimilate into white society or return to their villages to evangelize English culture and religion. A similar programme at the College of William and Mary was described by their president, Lyon G. Tyler, as a prison where Native children ‘served as so many hostages for the good behaviour of the rest’.

* This is true. Nice comes to us by way of the Old French nice (‘weak, clumsy, silly’), from the Latin nescius (‘ignorant, not knowing’).

* Thomas Love Peacock, essayist, poet, and friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley, had also enjoyed a long career in India as an official with the East India Company. He was, in that year, the Chief Examiner of Indian Correspondence.

* Meaning one’s favourite trope or favourite line of argument.

* This is not a quotation from the Book of Genesis, which recounts the scattering of languages at Babel in much tamer terms. It is rather from the Third Apocalypse of Baruch, falsely attributed to the scribe Baruch ben Neriah. Griffin, in a fit of disillusionment, had briefly pursued a project recounting various versions of the fall of Babel.

* 火藥味.

* 兔死狐悲.

* He would never know, for instance, that there was a time when Griffin, Sterling, Anthony, and Evie had thought of themselves as a cohort as eternally bonded as Robin’s did; or that Griffin and Sterling had quarrelled once over Evie, bright and vibrant and brilliant and beautiful Evie, or that Griffin truly hadn’t meant it when he’d killed her. In his retellings of that night, Griffin made himself out to be a calm and deliberate murderer. But the truth was that, like Robin, he’d acted without thinking, from anger, from fear, but not from malice; he did not even really believe it would work, for silver responded only sporadically to his command, and he didn’t know what he’d done until Evie was bleeding out on the floor. Nor would he ever know that Griffin, unlike Robin, had no cohort to lean on after his act, no one to help him absorb the shock of this violence. And so he’d swallowed it, curled in around it, made it a part of himself – and while for others this might have been the first step on the road to madness, Griffin Lovell had instead whittled this capacity to kill into a sharp and necessary weapon.

* This supplementary silver bar is one of the rare Old English–to-English match-pairs, created by a Hermes scholar, John Fugues, who participated in a project in the 1780s where scholars locked themselves in a castle and spoke only Old English to each other for three months. (Such experiments have not been repeated since, though not for lack of funding; Babel was simply unable to find volunteers willing to undergo the same extreme isolation, compounded by the inability to properly express oneself to others.) The Old English bēacen refers to audible signals, portents, and signs – instead of the rather flat English meaning, which just refers to a great signal of fire.

* 死豬不怕開水燙.

* This loophole was, in fact, deliberate. In its early days, the tower viciously attacked entrants and escapees alike, but the wards were imprecise, and the number of wrongful maimings escalated until the city government insisted there had to be some sort of due process. Professor Playfair’s response was to catch thieves only upon departure, when the incriminating evidence would be in their pockets or strewn across the cobblestones around them.

* This decision had been a matter of fierce debate between Robin and Victoire. Robin had wanted to hold all the scholars hostage; Victoire, instead, made the compelling argument that several dozen scholars were much more likely to comply with being forced out of a building at gunpoint than being trapped in a basement for weeks on end, with nowhere to bathe, do their laundry, or shit.

* The word strike, in relation to labour, originally had the connotation of submission. Ships would drop, or strike, their sails when surrendering to enemy forces or saluting their superiors. But when sailors in 1768 struck their sails in protest to demand better wages, they turned strike from an act of submission to a strategic act of violence; by withholding their labour, they proved they were in fact indispensable.