The Facts on File Dictionary of Allusions - Green Valley High School

go to Canossa
198
windswept moors, haunted castles, and other
oppressive surroundings, and the term is used
today in discussing novels, fi lms, etc. that have a
similarly brooding, melodramatic atmosphere.
“Its whole visible exterior was ornamented with
quaint fi gures, conceived in the grotesqueness of
a Gothic fancy, and drawn or stamped in the glittering
plaster, composed of lime, pebbles, and
bits of glass, with which the woodwork of the
walls was overspread” (Nathaniel Hawthorne, <strong>The</strong>
House of the Seven Gables, 1851). See also american
gothic.
go to Canossa (kanosb) To undergo humiliation,
especially by subjection to a more powerful body.
<strong>The</strong> allusion is to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry
IV, who in January 1077, having been excommunicated
by Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand) for contesting
the pope’s power to create bishops, dressed
as a penitent and stood for three days barefoot in
the snow in the pope’s palace at Canossa in order
to obtain forgiveness. <strong>The</strong> German chancellor Otto
von Bismarck famously resisted the church’s attempt to
control secular affairs with the declaration “We will not
go to Canossa!”
go to Gehenna See gehenna.
go to the ant, thou sluggard Don’t be lazy; stir
yourself to action. This expression appears in
Proverbs 6:6–9 as follows: “Go to the ant, thou
sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise: Which
having no guide, overseer, or ruler, Provideth
her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food
in the harvest. How long wilt thou sleep, O
sluggard? when wilt thou arise out of thy sleep?”
<strong>The</strong> foreman tipped the boy out of his hammock. “Go to
the ant, thou sluggard,” he said. “<strong>The</strong>re’s work to be
done.”
Götterdämmerung (gerterdembrung, gerterdambrung)
<strong>The</strong> end of the world; any titanic clash or
climactic disaster resulting in a universal cataclysm
or the fi nal destruction of a society or regime.
From the German for “twilight of the gods,” Götterdämmerung
is described in detail in Norse
mythology, which suggests that the world will
come to an end after a dreadful battle between the
good and evil gods in which all the good gods will
die heroic deaths. A new world will then arise
from the ashes of the old. Today the term is most
familiar from Götterdämmerung (1876), the last of
Richard Wagner’s four operas in the Ring cycle. If
his life had been an opera he would have considered this
last blow a prelude to his own personal Götterdämmerung.
See also ragnarok.
gourmand’s prayer <strong>The</strong> wish of diners that they
could savor the taste of good food for longer. It is
rendered by Aristotle (384–322 b.c.) in his Ethics
in the form “O Philoxenos, Philoxenos, why were
you not Prometheus?” Philoxenos was an epicure
who wished to have the neck of a crane so that he
might enjoy longer the taste of his food as he swallowed
it; Prometheus was the creator of humans,
who sadly did not include a cranelike neck in his
fi nal design. <strong>The</strong> meal that night was so good that I was
not the only diner to close his eyes in ecstasy and mutter
to himself the gourmand’s prayer that it would never
come to an end.
go west, young man Go out to meet life’s challenges.
<strong>The</strong> expression alludes to the title of an
editorial that appeared originally in the Terre Haute
Express in 1851, in which the young were encouraged
to travel west to meet the challenge of opening
up unsettled parts of the country. <strong>The</strong> call was
taken up by other newspapers and is often wrongly
attributed to New York journalist Horace Greeley