Private life

I am turning into one of those people who harrumph about words changing their meaning. In this case it is the way that private life has become synonymous & coterminous with sex life, even & perhaps especially in the sense of that aspect of our behaviour for which we have the greatest need of protection under the law of privacy.

It can just mean the life of one who has no public or official responsibilities.

Anglo-Saxon kings were wont to give up their thrones & retire to a monastery, though Pope Gregory and the Venerable Bede each wrote about the importance of kings remaining active men of affairs. The OED quotes from Richard Whitford’s Martiloge of 1526, one of the earliest written examples of private life in this sense: He resygned his crowne, & lyued a holy pryuate lyfe.

It is perhaps unfortunate for my wish to keep sex out of this that the only modern example of a king who abdicated the British throne did so because of his need to be with the woman he loved.

But prurience is nothing new either. Having read more than I would have wished of the historical literature on slavery (in the sense that that it most commonly understand that word to mean today in the UK & USA) I feel that the full context of another early illustrative quote in the OED, from JM Adair’s Unanswerable Arguments against the Abolition of the Slave Trade of 1790, is bound at least to cover breeding:

I think planters are much too remiss on this head, owing to their not employing a little attention to the private life & manners of their slaves

Even those who hold no responsibility outside the domestic sphere, even the celibate & chaste, expect,as they are entitled to expect, a private life. It is not limited to the bedroom.

Links
The Private Lives of British Pakistanis: Adil Ray

James Makittrick Adair

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Im only watching - what have you got to hide?
Privacy & food

There is kindness in Love: but Love and kindness are not coterminous. - C. S. Lewis: The Problem of Pain