Pecunious & Pecuniary ***

pecuniary







Y

[pi-kyoo-nee-er-ee]



D



–adjective 

1. of 

or 

pertaining to money: pecuniary difficultie[s].  



2. consisting of or given or exacted in money or monetary payments: pecuniary [tributes]. 

3. (of a crime, violation, etc.) involving a money penalty or fine.  



—Synonyms 

1, 2. See financial.



Financial, fiscal, monetary, pecuniary refer to matters concerned with money. 



Financial usually refers to money matters or transactions of some size or importance: a financial wizard. 



Fiscal is used esp. in connection with government funds, or those of any organization: the end of the fiscal [year]. 



Monetary relates esp. to money as such: a monetary [system] or [standard]. 



Pecuniary refers to money as used in making ordinary payments: a pecuniary [obligation] or [reward]. 





　

The friendship between Charles and Sebastian during a summer holiday at Brideshead is enchanted, and platonic until a tentative but passionate kiss. Then Lady Julia comes into [view], and during a later holiday in Venice, she and Charles fall in love -- and Sebastian is [shattered] when he realizes it. To blame his disintegration on lost love would be too simple, however, because from being an alcoholic, he rapidly progresses into self-destruction in the hashish and opium dens of Morocco, his youthful perfection turned into a ghastly caricature.



hashish

印度大麻花及葉製成的麻醉藥

den

(野獸的) 洞穴,窩巢

(盜賊的) 窩窟,活動場所



At the center of all of this is Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson, in a superb performance). Of her son's proclivities, she [professes] a certain vagueness. Of her daughter's love for Charles, she makes it clear that it is not the matter of his lower caste that is the problem (that could be lived with) but the fact that he is an atheist, and the Marchmains have been Roman Catholic from time immemorial.



This theme must have attracted Waugh because he was a Catholic convert, and was fascinated by the division between Catholics and Protestants as a social as well as a religious issue. Catholicism was once a [practice] punishable by death in England, and no doubt hidden somewhere in the stones of Brideshead is an ancient "priest hole," used by aristocratic Catholic families to conceal a priest if royal troops came sniffing. Lady Marchmain (and Julia) are not casually Catholic, but believe firmly in the dogma of the church, and that any unbaptized children would be forbidden the sight of God. Since Charles will not renounce his [atheism], he loses Julia, although not before first going as an ambassador for Lady Marchmain to Sebastian -- one of the film's best scenes.



relinguish (compelled)

renounce (formally, voluntary)

abandon (further)



There are two peculiar fathers in the film. Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon), still officially married of course, lives in exile in a Venetian palazzo with his mistress Cora (Greta Scacchi). Charles' father (Patrick Malahide) is a pronounced eccentric who lives embalmed in a London house and apparently prefers playing chess with himself to conversing with his son. He is a character from Dickens.



Charles is Dickensian in a way, too: The impecunious but parentless youth adrift in an unfamiliar social system. Matthew Goode plays him as a little bland, a mirror for the emotions he attracts. Whishaw steals all of his scenes as Sebastian, the carefree ones and the doom-[laden] ones. Atwell, as Julia, could have been drawn a little more carefully. The actress does what she can, but why, really, does Julia marry the odious and insufferable Rex Mottram, who is nothing more than a marked-down Jay Gatsby?



While elegantly mounted and well acted, the movie is not the [equal] of the TV production, in part because so much material had to be compressed into such a shorter time. It is also not the equal of the recent film "Atonement," which in an oblique way touches on similar issues. But it is a good, [sound] example of the British period drama; mid-range Merchant-Ivory, you could say. And I relished [it] when Charles' father barely noticed that he had gone away to Oxford -- or come back, for that matter.





pauper & penury

Meager