Group items tagged

While the killing of Osama bin Laden is being enthusiastically celebrated throughout America and parts of the world, to say that such merriment is out of order will surely be considered heresy. Nonetheless, I'm saying it -- because it needs to be said. What I am tempted to say is this: Get a grip, celebrators. Have you so little decency?

Originally a French word meaning "the twittering of birds," jargon, in English, was applied to the codes used by criminals who did not want law-abiding citizens to know what they were saying. Today jargon words are coined not to confuse outsiders but because the objects, jobs, or situations they describe may have no equivalents outside a particular profession.

That same evening, Bertha Day, the abbey's catering manager, also heard the singing. "I knew that Mrs. Mears, a local lady, had died," she said. Later both Sedgwick and Mrs. Day realized that they had heard the monks of Beaulieu Abbey singing a mass - their custom when one of the inhabitants of the nearby village had died. But no monks had lived in Beaulieu Abbey since 1538.