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Occasionally, the biblical term גר has been taken to refer to a “dependent worker” or “client” based on the thought that household membership can be gained through work provided to the household. Mention of household membership tests the identity of the sojourner in the ancient world as stranger or foreigner; a social category listed with widows and orphans—whose status is also defined by the household— as deserving of protection. Given its centrality as a basic social unit in the ancient Near East, we might expect that purchase in a household would grant a status that dissolves the social distance and attendant consequences (fragility of income, lack of patrimony, object of suspicion) thought to be borne by גרים. In what sense, then, is a “dependent worker” who secures membership in the household a גר ? This article reconsiders how distant a person must be from the society within which he resides to make him a ,גר shifting the semantic emphasis of this term away from origin and towards social integration.

In medieval England, the life of St. Edward the Confessor functioned as ideological myth; Henry III used it to show that the Plantagenet dynasty had reconciled two ‘nations’ within England after the Norman Conquest. Edward’s post-Conquest hagiography generally supports a sacralized monarchy and its prerogatives. However, a lesser-known, anonymous version of Edward’s life exists in Middle English verse and resists royalist mythmaking from a more populist perspective. In the South English Legendary and in several Middle English chronicles, a counter-tradition of writing about Edward continues to sacralize the saint-king but simultaneously positions him as a symbol of resistance to Plantagenet rule. In this tradition, the rhetoric of sacral kingship works unexpectedly: rather than sanctifying the authority of the ruling house, it reminds readers of a previous, dead monarch, whose claim to sanctity (the fulfillment of Edward’s famous prophecy of the green tree) should act as a check on the abuse of power by the presently-reigning dynasty. From this point of view, resistance to the Crown can be seen, not as discouraged and limited by the idea of sacral monarchy, but instead as partly motivated by it.

Popular management literature promotes the idea that certain management styles have a reflexive relationship with certain ways of talking. Consequently, by using prescribed ways of talking, certain management styles will be achieved and that, reflexively, certain management styles favor certain ways of talking. Using conversation analysis (CA) as a research methodology, this paper compares the prescriptive language advice of popular management literature as regards facilitation with video-taped data of naturally-occurring talk in a business meeting. Findings indicate that the intuitive insights on language use offered by popular management literature ignore the indexical nature of language use whereby the ‘meaning’ of any utterance and what that utterance does depends on its context of use. In short, such popular literature may lead managers up the (linguistic) garden path and may in fact be of little help in practice. The paper ends with a call for language advice in such literature to be more descriptive and less prescriptive.