4. We will recall, of course, that ‘holding’ – a metaphor itself – is central to the way in which the two roles of power in the community are referred to by the diarist. The way in which an approach to semantics that upholds the absolute equality of words, concepts, and things, had in this settlement as its parallel a deeply unequal relationship between people is pause for thought here. As, perhaps, is the fact that ‘authority’ itself, one of a multiplicity of English words for power over others, shares etymological roots with the power one may exercise over words as an ‘author.’