"There is a Hand to turn the time,
Though thy Glass today be run,
Till the Light that hath brought the Towers low
Find the last poor Pret'rite one . . .
Till the Riders sleep by ev'ry road,
All through our crippl'd Zone,
With a face on ev'ry mountainside,
And a Soul in ev'ry stone . . .
Now everybody --"
So saith
Tyrone Slothrop's
heretical Puritan ancestor William Slothrop, as seen on page 887
1 of
Thomas Pynchon's novel
Gravity's Rainbow.
Mr. Pynchon and the
OED have a bit more to say than
Webster 1913 does.
Here and there in
Gravity's Rainbow (and it's a central theme, for those who haven't already gotten all vacant and wandered off)
Pynchon speaks of
preterition and preterites in the
OED's
2 sense 3: "One who is
passed over or not
elected by
God;
cf. '
preterition' 4.
rare". This is
Calvinist theology:
The race is not to the swift; it's to the Boss's favorites. Why are they favored? Don't ask. They just are. It's easy to see how that kind of a
God would appeal to those with
inherited wealth. A
cynic might observe that those people have a lot of money to spend
subsidizing bright boys like
John Calvin who tell them that
God loves them best.
The
OED's quotation is a sheer delight, and
right on the money too: "
1864 Fraser's Mag May 533 The
reprobates who are
damned because they were always meant to be damned, and the
preterites who are
damned because they were never meant to be saved." Put
that in your
liberation theology and smoke it.
The same
OED tells me that the
Latin prefix "
preter-" or "
praeter-" signifies "past, by, beyond, above, more than" etc. Hmph. "Past" is not "passed";
go figure.
1 The
Bantam paperback;
Your Pagination May Vary.
2 Now who, what red-blooded
American among us, would not pay good money to see a
steel-cage grudge match between
EDB and the
OED?