I was walking through a grocery store at Wauchope, northern NSW, when I went past a couple of doors that had signs saying something like: “Don’t go through these doors or you will be disciplined”.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
My thoughts went back to high school days when students who were sent to the principal’s office were regaled with cakes while being lectured about their errant ways. If they timed things right, being sent to the principal’s office was a reward, rather than a punishment.
But I wondered what sort of discipline the manager of this grocery store had in mind. He had plenty of cakes on hand, but eating them might eat into his profits. I resisted the temptation to find out.
Here is a word that goes back at least to 1382, when John Wyclif said “thou shall finde grace and good discipline”. They couldn’t spell much in those days. They probably had no high schools either, at least staffed by principals armed with cakes. But in those days discipline meant much as it does today – an instruction to scholars, with emphasis on teaching, learning and schooling. Even Shakespeare had a go at it in 1606.
The church entered the fray also. My big dictionary says the word referred to “modes of procedure held to have been observed in the early church in gradually teaching the mysteries of the Christian faith and concealing them from the initiated”. But in 1434 the word was also used in the sense of “proper conduct” and “the training of scholars”.
In 1607 Francis Bacon referred to a “wife” handing out discipline. Some things never change. Discipline was also used in the sense of training or skill in military affairs or “the art of war”. Then came a course of training and a system for the maintenance of order and “the system by which order is maintained in a church”. Nothing about grocery stores there, but the Presbyterians were mentioned, as well as the Reformed Church of Scotland.
The word gained some strength with the definitions “a beating” and “a whip, one used for religious penance”.
Finally, my big dictionary says “a master in a school employed not to teach, but to keep order among the pupils”. It doesn’t say anything about cake. But if I can throw in my penny’s worth, the bloke who gave out cake to the errant students probably knew what he was doing. He was treating those students with respect and showing that a kindness given deserves some kindness in return.
And for at least some of those students, that was a principle that should be carried through life. That’s what I have been told anyway. I never got to eat cake in the principal’s office.
