One of Aubrey Beardsley’s radical 1893 illustrations for Oscar Wilde’s Salome. The complex psychological underpinnings of jealousy, and what they might reveal in the way of relief, and how they might illuminate the most hopeful frontiers of love, is what the pioneering psychiatrist Leslie Farber (July 12, 1912–March 24, 1981) explores in his 1973 essay “On Jealousy,” found in his altogether penetrating collection The Ways of the Will ( public library). “Jealousy,” wrote the Swiss philosopher Henri-Frédéric Amiel in his insightful treatise on love, “is precisely love’s contrary… the most passionate form of egotism, the glorification of a despotic, exacting, and vain ego, which can neither forget nor subordinate itself.” And yet jealousy is also one of the commonest human experiences - one that visits upon even the noblest heart, warping reality and reason beyond recognition. Current use of this name to describe an overused joke or saying implies that Mottley’s compilation was not very funny, and perhaps included jokes which were old even at that time.There is but one emotion that claws at the heart with the twin talons of anger and shame, savaging self-regard with haunting ferocity that feeds on itself.
In 1739 a man by the name of John Mot-tley put together a book of jests and called it Joe Miller’s Jest-Book, after the name of an illiterate comedian who lived 1684-1738.
The expression has been in use since 1883. His listener Pablo breaks in suddenly, correcting cork tree to chestnut tree, saying “I should know as well as you having heard you tell the tale these twenty-seven times.” The popularization of the term is attributed to the comedian William Warren, who had played the role of Pablo many times, and who is said to have repeated Pablo’s line about the chestnut in response to an unoriginal story told at a dinner party. In the play, Captain Zavier is retelling, for the umpteenth time, a story having to do with a cork tree. Although the exact origin of this term is unknown, one plausible explanation is that it comes from an old melodrama, The Broken Sword, by William Dillon. Chestnut An old, stale joke a trite, oft-repeated tale or story.
0 kommentar(er)
