From David Sirlin’s “Playing to Win” — a game designer on the distinction between self-imposed rules and actual rules:
“The first step in becoming a top player is the realization that playing to win means doing whatever most increases your chances of winning. That is true by definition of playing to win. The game knows no rules of ‘honor’ or of ‘cheapness.’ The game only knows winning and losing.”
The “scrub” is the player who invents additional rules — honour codes, prohibitions on “cheap” tactics — and then loses to players who don’t share those rules. The scrub’s mistake isn’t moral. It’s categorical: confusing the rules they wish existed with the rules that do.
Poets do this. Metrical convention, decorum, the hierarchy of genres — these are rules the game doesn’t enforce. A sonnet “should” be fourteen lines, but nothing breaks if it isn’t. Skelton’s tumbling verse was “rude and playne” by the standards of his contemporaries, who had invented rules of decorum that the language didn’t require. Milton’s blank verse was “cheap” to rhyme-scrubs. Free verse was the ultimate scrub-triggering move.
Where does the philologist’s method sit? Etymology traces what words actually did — the real rules, the actual moves — regardless of what grammarians said they should do. Is etymology the anti-scrub discipline? Or does it have its own invisible honour code — privileging Latin roots, treating Anglo-Saxon as more “authentic” than Norman French, preferring the older sense as the “real” one?
They then, who of each trip th’ advantage take, Find but those Faults, which they want Wit to make.
— Dryden, Prologue to Tyrannick Love (1681)
The scrub-critic, exactly. And Dryden’s own position isn’t neutral: “rashness is a better fault than fear” is a value judgment dressed as a tactical observation. He’s not describing what the game enforces — he’s smuggling in what it should reward. The same move the etymologist makes when “older” quietly becomes “more authentic.” Dryden knows the rules don’t require caution. He’s arguing they shouldn’t.
Latin caupo — petty tradesman, huckster — appears in the Vulgate’s Sirach: non iustificabitur caupo a peccatis labiae, the trader will not be acquitted of the sins of his lips. The Germanic languages borrowed this word and suppressed the suspicion. OE ceap means trade, bargain, market — Cheapside is the marketplace, not the gutter. English rebuilt the judgment: god chep becomes cheap, common, contemptible. The word for what the scrub despises is Latin that forgot it was Latin, a huckster’s word that went native in Germanic and then degraded back to what caupo always meant. The discipline’s own scrub-rule is the etymological fallacy — the oldest sense is the real one. But trace cheap to its oldest sense, and it was already a cheat.
“Underscore / The cheap thing—thousands to the fore!”
SHOP, Browning (1868)
The tradesman’s instinct: mark down the low-value item, move volume. But Browning gives “underscore” to the merchant’s own voice — the word means both mark it down in price and emphasize it, so the act of cheapening is simultaneously the act of foregrounding. The huckster’s sin of the lips, Sirach’s peccatum labiae, was precisely this: speech that makes the shoddy appear central. The caupo condemned for what his mouth does to his merchandise survives intact in this merchant’s internal monologue, five centuries after the word forgot it was Latin. The degradation the philologist traces through the dictionaries — ceap to cheap to contemptible — Browning performs inside a single verb.
ON skor — notch, incision. Anglo-Norman has no entry. The word that records the merchant’s transaction stayed outside the Latin borrowing circuit — Norse hands cutting tallies while the goods spoke Latin. Browning’s merchant underscoring the cheap thing enacts the split: the word being cheapened is caupo in disguise; the word doing the marking is Norse. And the Sirach verse names the difference: the caupo sins with his lips. The score is not speech — it is a cut.
Pure lips, sweet seales in my soft lips imprinted, VVhat bargaines may I make still to be sealing? To sell my selfe I can be well contented, So thou wilt buy, and pay, and vse good dealing, VVhich purchase if thou make, for feare of slips, Set thy seale manuell, on my wax-red lips.
— Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis (1593)
The contract is all lips — sealing, selling, the kiss as signature. Not a notch anywhere. Shakespeare’s market vocabulary here is entirely oral and wax-soft, the caupo’s side of the split: lips as seals, as instruments of bargain, the transaction completed by speech and impression rather than incision. The score is absent. What remains when you take the cut out of commerce is this: purchase that leaves no mark, a deal that depends entirely on the other party’s word.
AN purchacer — pur- + chacier, to chase forth. The commercial sense is third in the Anglo-Norman Dictionary; the first is “to seek, pursue, strive for.” A twelfth-century romance: Mult fait bon porchacer s’amor — it is very good to pursue her love. Venus’s purchase is not commerce stripped of the score. The word was erotic pursuit before it was ever a transaction.
The Knight’s Tale doesn’t use the word — but it stages the problem. Venus floats in her sea, naked, the citole in hand, and Chaucer’s Venus-ekphrasis is itself a form of purchas: the narrator striving toward an object that recedes, the description circling and not arriving. The waves cover her from the navel down. The chase is structural.
What Chaucer knows that the Anglo-Norman dictionary entry can’t show: the erotic pursuit is already embedded in the act of looking, of describing. Porchacer s’amor — but the amor stays half-submerged.
The word that would become commercial was, first, this: the effort that doesn’t complete.
Chaucer’s devil in the Friar’s Tale knows the word exactly: “My purchas is theffect of al my rente.” No passive income — the fiend’s entire economy is chase. Where the Knight’s Tale Venus stages the purchas that never arrives, the devil’s always does. And early fourteenth-century English named the junction: wif of purchase, a concubine — the woman obtained through effort, not contract. Marriage is rente. The concubine is purchas.
Pope’s January, translating Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale:
Each nymph by turns his wavering mind possess’d, And reign’d the short-lived tyrant of his breast
January is the man who converts purchas into rente by contracting marriage — and the stanza reveals exactly what that conversion costs. The word is “possess’d,” but the grammar won’t stabilize it: each nymph possesses him, reigns over him, and then vacates. The rente he reaches for keeps behaving like purchas. He signs the contract and the chase doesn’t stop; it just moves inside the marriage.
Which is the fiend’s problem inverted. The fiend can only ever purchas — that’s his damnation. January’s damnation is that he mistakes purchas for something that can be turned into rente by legal instrument. The concubine and the wife are the same acquisition; only the paperwork differs.
Possidere = potis + sedere: to sit on something with power. Gaius was careful: “in that soil the dominium belongs to the Roman people or Caesar; we only seem to have the possessio.” Seisin — occupation, tenure, the right to income — without title. January’s marriage contract buys him that; the dominium is elsewhere. The Beatitude has the same structure: beati mites, quoniam ipsi possidebunt terram — the meek shall possess, not own, the earth. What the kingdom of heaven promises is possessio too. Whose dominium is it?
Every one King of all thy Kingdom! Can every one be higher than all the rest: My Joy that thou Reignest blessed in Heaven. No life pleases me but the similitude of God. No Riches but thine, O Lord. (All are thine rightly understood.)
— Traherne, “Thanksgivings for God’s Attributes” (1699)
Traherne’s solution to the possessio/dominium gap is to collapse it by making dominium the only category that exists. “All are thine rightly understood” — rightly understood is doing the structural work: misunderstanding produces the illusion of private title, understanding restores everything to its correct tenure as divine possession. But then: “Every one King of all thy Kingdom.” This is not a redistribution of dominium. It’s an argument that possessio, universalized and simultaneous, is what the kingdom offers — not ownership conferred, but occupation without exclusion, seisin without the enclosure that makes seisin meaningful. The Beatitude’s structure holds: the meek shall possidebunt, and the dominium stays where it was. Traherne is fine with this. He finds it sufficient — more than sufficient, finds it the only coherent form of having anything at all. What he can’t quite suppress is the parenthesis.
Sirach 36:27: ubi non est sepis diripietur possessio — where there is no hedge, possession will be plundered. The Vulgate names the condition — seisin without enclosure — and calls it loss.
Traherne’s parenthesis replaces the sepis. “(All are thine rightly understood)” substitutes a hermeneutic act for the physical hedge: understanding is the fence that makes unenclosed possession hold. Boethius had the word for what holds without a fence: aeternitas est interminabilis vitae tota simul et perfecta possessio. The “all” Traherne needs is Boethius’s tota simul; the parenthesis is what gets him there.