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Mind your language

Where did ‘taking a knee’ come from?

13 June 2020

9:00 AM

13 June 2020

9:00 AM

That sympathetic physician, Sir Thomas Browne, thought himself austere in conversation. ‘Yet, at my devotion,’ he confessed in Religio Medici (from the 1630s), ‘I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, and hand, with all those outward and sensible motions which may express or promote my invisible devotion.

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