Tuesday, January 22, 2008

if you call that virtue


Fred alerted me to the presence of this sampler on his blog. If you click to enlarge you can see the quotes also present around the word "husband." I've always had some sarcasm about the way this Proverbs passage gets deployed. I think this stitcher did too.

8 comments:

Cheryl said...

This isn't about "this" post (ha!), but about the concept of your blog. I LOVE IT! My mom is ALWAYS putting things in quotes and I have NO clue why, but of course I can't ask why...a sample sentence (about my birthday-) I know that you are glad to be back "home" to celebrate! ???

Her use of random quotation marks is only exceeded by her love of exclamation points. The sentence right before the one in the previous paragraph is Hope that you have the BEST birthday ever!!!!!!!!!!! I kid you not. I cut/paste that exactly as it is.

The one thing she doesn't do that almost everyone else does is the extraneous apostrophes as in "the dog ate it's lunch, which he had hunted down and killed".

Look forward to more!

Anonymous said...

Glad I'm not one of those "virtuous" women. There's a file I keep on my desktop from a 1950s magazine about the things a "good wife" should do. It's ridiculous. I keep it on my desktop to remind me that I'm my own person and never a shadow of a man, as the article suggests I should be.
I'm not a big fan of cross-stitch, so what is this thing? Are you buying the pattern or the actual piece to hang on your wall? I've seen things written in cross stitch and they usually look very legible, unlike this one.

Anonymous said...

Apparently my man didn't teach me to follow links. "It's a quilted wall hanging printed with the words of the 31st chapter of the Proverbs of Solomon." Should have figured it was from the Bible.

bethany said...

It looks like embroidery to me, actually, but I'm not a folk-art expert.

Anonymous said...

The Subversive Stitch had some good samplers done by women back when they had to show fine needle work as part of being a fine woman. some were very sarcastic. ~"I'm bored. My husband is a feudal wank. These conical hats are lame. Get me out of this bloody castle!" but with a tad more subtlety.

Karen said...

What kills me about errors on samplers and other handcrafted items such as this one (assuming it wasn't done as deliberate sarcasm, of which I approve) is all the time put in--and then you just have something embarrassing to hang up or pass down because you can't get rid of cross-stitch, etc.

I have a gorgeous hand-done wooden sign made for my family by my sister--and I had to pretend I lost it when we moved because I wouldn't hang it up-- that has the common error of adding an apostrophe to one's family name to indicate plurality, i.e., the Smith's, the Phoneme's, the Silly's.

Anonymous said...

Hi Cheryl,

My mum did that with quotes on greeting cards, too (before you correct me, I'm Australian so we have mums, not moms): Hope you have a "wonderful" birthday and all your "dreams" come true, lots of love "Mum and Dad".

Being pedantic about these things, I pointed out to her that the use of quotes to emphasize words inferred that "wonderful" might mean something subversive or totally opposite of what she was actually trying to say...

My mother's response to this: she now UNDERLINES everything instead.

ARRGGGHHHH!

Anonymous said...

So would a truly virtuous woman be lazy and shiftless? If so, then I'm well on my way to virtue.