The only thing I can remember about a Tesco advertisement on the television the other night is the line: ‘No rest for the wicked.’ It was meant ironically, of course.
The only thing I can remember about a Tesco advertisement on the television the other night is the line: ‘No rest for the wicked.’ It was meant ironically, of course. The suggestion was not that wicked people alone shop at Tesco’s. Nor was the phrase intended as a pious invocation of the Bible, its source, Isaiah, 57:21.
An anthropologist describing the clichés, or tropes, of Western cultures might form the idea that biblical religion played a lively part in daily discourse. Just as we hear an Arab say, ‘God put me in the High Street this morning,’ and suppose that the man sees life as one theurgic system, so our speech seems a mosaic of sacred texts.
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