THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, January 21, 1997 TAG: 9701210001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A17 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: GEORGE HEBERT
LENGTH: 50 lines
A two-word phrase caught my eye - and rang an old bell - the other day when I was browsing a microfilmed newspaper file at Norfolk's Kirn Memorial Library.
It was quite an old file. Quite early in this century. The report that caused me to stop winding the reel and turn the zoom knob for a blow-up was in The Virginian-Pilot and Norfolk Landmark issue of Aug. 2, 1919.
It was about a woman who had been captured in Omaha and brought back to Norfolk to face a charge of passing a worthless check, for $2,000, at a local jewelry store.
The paper gave the woman's name, described her as beautiful, said she claimed to be the wife of an Army officer, and went on to announce that she ``languishes in durance vile awaiting a preliminary hearing.''
``Durance vile.''
This was the ancient cliche that jumped out at me.
For I remembered it clearly - as some others may - from a history-making speech delivered in Richmond almost 40 years ago.
That was the occasion on which then Gov. J. Lindsay Almond turned the state away from further resistance to court-ordered racial desegration of Virginia's classrooms. In his speech of Jan. 28, 1959, he committed himself to the preservation of public schooling, saying that the state had no choice but to comply with the federal decrees. But he insisted that if he thought he could preserve segregation by defiance, he would have taken that course - even at the risk to himself of ``durance vile.''
He meant, of course, that he would have been willing to go to jail for disobeying the courts. But perhaps for dramatic effect, and with his own well-known flair for orotund public language, he turned possible cell time into ``durance vile.'' Dictionaries still give durance as a synonym for imprisonment, but it's quite old-fashioned and positively archaic when accompanied by that ``vile.''
Which reminds that the existence, and the occasional dredging up, of certain antique bits of English are pretty curious things anyhow.
In Governor Almond's time - though apparently not at the earlier point when the worthless-check story appeared in the Norfolk paper - the use of something like ``durance vile'' was likely to bring some fun-poking. Just as would be the case today if certain other antique usages should crop up in ordinary speech or writing - like ``bounding main'' for the ocean, ``peruse'' for read, ``brook'' no interference, ``tonsorial'' to describe hair-cutting, ``poltroon'' for coward.
And surely (shame on me, too), that ``orotund'' three paragraphs back. MEMO: Mr. Hebert, a former editor, lives in Norfolk.