It seems that once, instead of or as well as its current sense of a fancy meal in a fancy room for lots of fancily dressed people, perhaps royal people with crowns and coronets, it also used to have the sense of a picnic in the country, perhaps the sort of thing the Elizabethan court would have had spread for them, perhaps on trestles and boards carried in the baggage train, in the intervals of chasing deer around a forest. A space for courtly dalliance. Perhaps fruit, nuts and wine rather than pie and chips - at which point I associate to the picture included above, quickly turned up by google despite my asking for Holman Hunt rather than Millais. (Clearly time to revisit the Walker Gallery, where it now lives).
Up and off to OED, which lists six meanings under two nounal head words, covering various kinds of food events, various kinds of food and an outlier to do with horses.
Then to Collins & Robert (ex Oxfam, Tunbridge Wells) which has the modern sort of banquet, but also points out that the word derives from the Italian for a small table, that is to say a bench. We can also branch off to banker, perhaps one of the earlier professionals to sit on a small bench at a big bench. Or to the benchers of our own legal system.
Whereas my concise Lewis list no words starting with 'ban' and very few starting with 'ben', none of them relevant. In fact, the initial 'b' does not seem to be very big in Latin at all.
So perhaps, all things considered, the OED did well to say that the relationship between the various meanings was obscure.
My second concerns the rights of criminals, possibly the criminally insane or the not criminal by virtue of insanity, to receive fan mail. A well-attested phenomenon which google and wikipedia tell me goes under the name of hybristophilia.
It seems that, at least in some circumstances, such mail is delivered. The right of odd women (I think it is usually women) to send odd mail to evil men (here again, I think it is usually men) is thereby asserted.
My view this morning is that odd women do not have this right, or at least the evil men concerned do not have the right to receive the resulting mail, thus gratifying their evil desires and phantasies. One approach would be to say evil men have no right to receive mail at all. Another might be to say that all their mail is censored by a suitably qualified censor and inappropriate mail is blocked. Either way, we might well make the decent management of the incarcerated evil person even more difficult than it is already, but it offends me that we should allow gratification.
A subsidiary issue would be whether to return the blocked mail to sender. My inclination would be not; the urge to send might fade with lack of response. But should one log such women in some sort of register as having committed something which is, after all, not much more than a thought crime? Thought crimes still being allowed to go unpunished, at least in most parts of the world.
Perhaps google can tell me what the rules and regulations governing such matters are.
A word of warning to those framing such. I used to know a chap who had been in the Military Police and who had experience of military prisons, known to be tougher than civilian ones. His story was that you will never stop the traffic of contraband in and out of prisons - including drugs and letters - short of reversion to the old-fashioned technique of the oubliette, probably outlawed by the European Commission of Human Rights.
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