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Mind your language

Trahison des clercs — a phrase that dates back all the way to 1927

3 March 2018

9:00 AM

3 March 2018

9:00 AM

I had long associated the phrase trahison des clercs with the writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft, though I can’t put my finger on examples in his oeuvre.

In any case, I wrongly presumed that trahison des clercs dated from the Middle Ages, when clerks in orders were the learned ones, like Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxford, responsible for faithfulness to the knowledge they had.

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