I seem to have kicked off a bit of email chatter with my reference to the divine afflatus (link, last graf). Hm--well, I admit it is not a household phrase, but it was familiar to me, I assumed from my newspaper days back in Kentucy, where politicians provide a dependable flow of hot air. Sure enough, it turns out that there is an essay of that name by H. L. Mencken, reprinted in his Prejudices: Second Series (link)—Mencken, the presiding deity of journalists of my generation (our Tim Russert? Now, that bears some thought). And apparently there is a straight line back to Cicero.
It seems the phrase gained prominence among the 19th-Century romantics as tarted-up Sunday dress for “inspiration.” I assume it is also cognate with “flatulence,” and in an age of Victorian propriety, I don’t suppose it was much trick at all for an impudent schoolboy (with even a minimal classical education) to suggest the imputation that nice ladies might, well, em, fart.
In an age where the nicest of ladies has established her connection with main drainage, I suppose the connection is no longer even salacious. Perhaps the pivot point was the limerick conventionally attributed to Woodrow Wilson:
I sat next to the duchess at tea;
It was just as I feard it would be:
Her rumblings abdominal
Were simply phenomenal
And everyone thought it was me.
I’ve seen that one in the teacher’s edition of a songbook for primary schoolchildren. So I’d say the gas is pretty much out of the bag.
Uh, let me rephrase that your honor. Meanwhile, here is a particularly ripe example:
[She] writes like an inspired priestess—not without a most truthful heart, but a heart that is devoted to religion, and whose individuality is cast upward in the divine afflatus, and dissolved and carried off in the recipient breath of angelic ministrants.
--Richard Hengist Horne, A New Spirit of the Age 27- (1944), quoted here.
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