‘We can now see the sunlight and the pasture ahead of us,’ said Boris Johnson on our escape from a tunnel under an Alpine peak. One could almost hear the cowbells and the echo of a yodel.
From schooldays the Prime Minister will remember in chapel the Psalm ‘The Lord is my shepherd’, which declares: ‘He shall feed me in a green pasture.’ The Prayer Book superscribes the psalm with its Latin beginning ‘Dominus regit me’. Under Elizabeth I, places where Latin was expected to be understood, such as Oxford, Cambridge and Eton, could use a Book of Common Prayer in Latin. I don’t think it has been much seen in living memory.
Pasture comes from Latin. The late Latin pastura is post-classical and never encountered by those studying Cicero and Virgil. But in classical Latin, past– is the past-participial stem of pascere, ‘to feed or graze’.
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