From time to time there are complaints in the Friend about the obscurity of Quaker terminology. Photo: Photo: Horia Varlan / flickr CC
Eye - 11 May 2012
From Quaker phrases to Cadbury chocolate
Alternative Quaker Dictionary
From time to time there are complaints in the Friend about the obscurity of Quaker terminology. Paul Honigmann offers the following helpful suggestions:
- Advocacy: A form of egg-nog, much enjoyed by Friends in the Netherlands.
- Area Meeting: A gathering of surveyors to measure plots of land around Meeting houses.
- Discernment: a) a taste for good wine, b) the scattering of ashes at a Friends burial ground.
- Elders: Trees, favoured by Friends for cordials that can be distilled from their flowers and berries.
- Experiment with Light: A group founded by Thomas Eddison to promote research for the improvement of electric bulbs.
- Outreach: A physical exercise favoured by Friends who are keen on meditation.
- Overseers: Periscopes.
- Quaker Council for European Affairs: Marriage guidance for Friends who keep a mistress in Brussels, Strasbourg and/or The Hague.
- Quaker Quest: An eighteenth century translation of Homer’s The Iliad, in which Pendle Hill is Mount Olympus, Troy is ‘the Bloody City of Lichfield’, Menelaus is George Fox, William Penn is Ulysses and James Nayler is Achilles.
- Speaking truth to power: Harnessing wind-bags to generate low carbon renewable electricity.
- Testimony: A special gathering of Quaker bankers to decide which notes and coins are genuine and which are counterfeit.
- Yearly Meeting: a) midnight on the 31st of 12th month; b) an afternoon of horse racing, usually at York, of course.
A chocolate conscience
It is hard to keep a Cadbury away from chocolate. Eye is heartened to hear that the great-granddaughter of the founder of the famous chocolate company intends to follow in the family tradition.
Felicity Loudon was one of the most passionate and articulate critics of the hostile Kraft takeover of Cadbury in January 2010.
Three months before the shareholders accepted the £11.5 billion bid she described the potential sale of the cherished British company to ‘an American plastic-cheese company’ as a ‘horror story’. Many Quakers shared her view.
‘I never realised that foreign predators could come and take our British companies, and I feel this is so wrong,’ she said. Now Felicity, who gave up her Cadbury surname when she married in 1996, has sold her £30 million Cotswold mansion to help fund her own chocolate company.
‘I would love it to be a success, love it to be seen not as a replacement for Cadbury but, in a way, as a memorial to my grandfather,’ she adds.
She is making quite a sacrifice to pursue her dream of maintaining a family tradition of producing chocolate. The mansion has sixteen bedrooms, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, and a number of cottages set in a 650 acre estate.
Comments
I hope it will be fair trade, and that Felicities company will bring out a hot drinking chocolate with over 50% chocolate in it so that I can indulge again. Green and Blacks used to be the bees knees of a hot choc, but it’s not the same now. I am not sure if it’s adulterated by ingredients or just by association.
By BillinNZ on 11th May 2012 - 10:24
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