The Budget (which the revolutionary fiscal act last week was technically not) is directly connected with bilge and with one of the circles of Dante’s Hell, the eighth, which houses the financial fraudsters, speculators, extortionists, counterfeiters and false forecasters.
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Andrew Scull
When six of her 12 children went mad, Mimi Galvin did her best to make to light of it
The circle is divided into the ten ditches of Malebolge. The Malebolge, singular bolgia, take their name from Latin malus (‘evil’) and bulga (‘bag’). The early commentator on Dante, Benvenuto da Imola, says that bolgia in Florentine speech means a concave and capacious ditch. In Dante’s Hell inside the Earth, the Malebolge are concentric.
Budget also comes from the Latin bulga. We are just about aware of the obsolescent budget meaning a leather wallet and its content, metaphorically, as in a ‘budget of news’. Of the government Budget, the word was first applied in a satirical pamphlet on Walpole from 1733, likening him to a mountebank or quack: ‘The Budget is opened; and our State Emperick hath dispensed his packets by his Zany Couriers through all Parts of the Kingdom.’
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