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A Manner of Speaking: Access and the Vernacular

Experiencia docet …

[Experience teaches …]

Proverbial

ALONGSIDE QUESTIONS OF OFFICIAL authorization and self-presentation medieval preachers, like modern ones, had to consider the purely practical aspects of how to get their message across to audiences. Fundamental among these was, of course, the question of language. Unlike modern scholars, medieval preachers seem to have had little interest in the relationship between Latin and vernacular language—or at least little direct record of their musings on this topic has survived.¹ It is thus difficult to know, in most cases, in what language they would have preached, though recent scholarship has suggested that the long-standing notion that Latin sermons were always preached to the clergy and vernacular sermons to the laity, with little or no overlap, may be too simple.² Medieval preachers’ attention, however, seems to have focused far more on their access to their audiences, an issue that in a larger sense addresses precisely the question of the place of the vernacular in preaching.

The great revival of formal interest in preaching took place before the major debates in England about the vernacular and its appropriate place in religious culture broke out in force, and in general preaching handbooks do not emphasize the question of language.³ Nevertheless, attentiveness to preachers’ discussions of their own language can illustrate how shifting and uncertain the supposed divide between Latin and vernacular really was. Preaching manuals, particularly those by mendicant authors, and discussions of narrative exempla show preachers engaged in a delicate balancing act. Standing between the church hierarchy and the laity in both the mediatory and the liminal senses of the word, preachers required access to both of those worlds in order to make them accessible to one another. The preaching handbooks, with their complex attention to the preacher’s need both to distinguish himself from and to resemble his flock, and discussions of exempla, which hovered problematically between vernacular and Latin modes, show how crucial vernacularity was in establishing a clerical identity that is often seen in opposition to it.

Vernacularity is not the same as popularity, but the Latin term most preachers used to describe the vernacular suggests that in this context the two are not unrelated. The word vernacularis, while not unheard of, appears far less often than the word vulgaris and its offshoots, meaning “common,” “popular,” “of the crowd,” and so forth.⁴ Thus it is sometimes impossible to tell whether a writer is referring to a story in the vernacular or merely a popular story, a vernacular saying or a common saying. This distinction, or lack thereof, is important because vernacularity in preaching has to do not simply with language but with the preacher’s ability to form a connection with his audience, to gain access to their hearts and minds. Access is often discussed in terms of exclusion—the need for access implies a prior separation. In preaching, however, access is more a matter of an effective approach, of addressing a given audience in terms appropriate to their situation. Like many of the sermons they left behind, most preachers must have been linguistic and cultural hybrids.⁵ Thinking about vernacularity as access helps us to understand how preachers fashioned themselves as representatives of clerical culture who maintained their links to the vernacular culture that surrounded them and that was their first linguistic home.

Talking the Talk: The Preacher’s Bridge

The kind of preaching that we think of as vernacular preaching, preaching to “the people” or the laity, was associated throughout most of Christian history with the lower clergy, as Michel Zink has noted, because it was the lower clergy—below the bishop, that is—who were able to communicate with their flocks in the native, “common” language of the region.⁶ It was perhaps a lack of sufficiently prepared lower clergy that led to a growing perception, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, that the clerical hierarchy was not fulfilling its preaching duties; instead independent, charismatic preachers—some more orthodox than others—sprang up to fill the gap.

The situation of the Milanese Patarenes, discussed at length by Brian Stock, demonstrates the power of such popular preachers. In an account of the Patarene Landulf Cotta’s preaching, the conservative chronicler Arnulf maintains that it was “deliberately ‘arranged’ for the persuasion of the unsophisticated (concionatur in populo).” His description shows a charismatic preacher at work, using the tropes of inadequacy and unlearnedness, youth, inexperience, and so forth—claims that diminish the distance between preacher and audience. As Stock puts it, Landulf “reaches out to the people on their own level, making himself a bridge between the lettered and the unlettered”; he is described as using a kind of call-and response format and asking the audience to cross themselves: “Both oral and gestural, this revivalist give and take between preacher and audience, which the reduction of the text to Latin undoubtedly tended to suppress, has the effect of welding the two into a single unit.” Landulf uses what Stock calls “street language.… Although he is not one of the people, he speaks to them as if he were”; this identificatory move, achieved through the preacher’s self-presentation and his choice of the “common” language, is apparently essential to his success. As Arnulf sees it, Landulf and Ariald were quick to “pander … to the people’s tastes (vulgi mos),” but it was this very kind of aristocratic, antipopulist disdain that put the institutional church at such a disadvantage in the period before the preaching revival.⁷ In such a situation the only hope lay in the work of outstanding preachers of orthodox inclination, and records of preaching for the twelfth century present men such as Bernard of Clairvaux or Robert of Arbrissel, whose charismatic gifts were so great that it was said they could preach in an unknown language and still move their audiences. It was also noted of Bernard, in one of his vitae, that he was “lettered among the learned, simple among the simple”—in other words, that he was able to adapt to his audience and the “vulgi mos” in a way that made him a gifted preacher among all kinds of listeners.⁸

Bernard, Robert, and their ilk are exceptional cases; not everyone who preaches to the people is a popular preacher. Faced with the need for more and better ordinary preaching, the church in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries pulled itself together and began trying to train people, using in effect the kinds of methods so intelligently exploited by heterodox preachers such as Landulf Cotta. What had come naturally, or gracefully, to a Bernard or a Robert was something that had to be learned by the preachers of the thirteenth century, who needed to be trained both in Latinity (immersion in the scriptural founts of their vocation and understanding of their institutional position) and in vernacularity (the techniques that would enable them to use their knowledge for the benefit of all kinds of audiences). In learning to balance Latin and the vernacular, preachers were in effect learning to establish their own role in a community, and vernacularity was as important in this endeavor as Latinity.

Preachers’ mediatory role as “translators” of literate, Latin, clerical culture for an unlearned, lay, “vernacular” audience can certainly be seen as one that denied the laity full or independent access to Scripture and to theological material usually produced in Latin. Opposition to vernacular translation of Scripture was already an issue in this period, and the famous, or infamous, idea that the laity are to be presented with truth in simple form as infants are given milk, because they are not strong enough for solid food, is frequently featured in preaching manuals.⁹ Considered from the point of view of doctrine, then, the Latin-vernacular relationship in thirteenth-century preaching seems to recapitulate a hierarchy in which the laity—rudes, simplices, illiterati—were always at the bottom, accorded no independent will, power, or ability. Even within the preaching manuals, though, we are given reason to question this strict division of the vernacular and Latin and the strict association of these with laity and clergy, respectively. To understand this problem fully, it is necessary first to develop a more nuanced conception of how preachers thought of their role. The works of Thomas of Chobham and Humbert of Romans, who shared a strong interest in effective preaching but wrote for very different groups of preachers, begin to outline the issues.

Writing primarily for parish priests, Thomas was more concerned with establishing the preacher’s differences from his audience than telling him how to overcome those differences—an emphasis that no doubt reflects the state of the parish clergy, many of whom were probably hardly more educated than those they were supposed to instruct.¹⁰ Thomas’s text, which shows a careful attention to the problems of pastoral care, has little to say about the vernacular in any of its forms. His focus in this area is on the preacher’s need to maintain his position—to establish and present an appropriate persona to his congregation and to keep up the distinctions between himself and them. This is a matter of responsibility as much as privilege; the preacher owes his audience a good example and good teaching and must work to provide them. But he should also be conscious of and maintain his authority. Thomas discusses, for example, the dangers of excessive humility toward those one has wronged, which can diminish the preacher’s stature, and he warns against preaching in scruffy clothes or a “habitu laicali.”¹¹ His attitude reflects, it seems, both the popularity of lay and itinerant preaching—in which the preacher’s status was not always markedly distinguished from that of his audience—and the beginning of a trend in parochial priesthood in the thirteenth century whereby the priest became increasingly the representative of a larger, diocesan authority, of the church as a whole rather than simply of his own local jurisdiction.¹² In the context Thomas addresses, the priest would have been part of the community to which he preached. He would be known to them—perhaps all too well—and so would not have needed Thomas’s, or anyone’s, instructions on how to approach them. In this instance the preacher needs to be shown how he can establish, maintain, and display his access to the clerical world of learning and authority in order to make his role in the “popular” world, of which he is clearly a part, an effective one.

In the course of the thirteenth century new modes of preaching arose, distinct from both the charismatic and the parochial. The rise of the Franciscans and Dominicans produced a substantial group of itinerant, trained preachers who would not necessarily be acquainted with the language, customs, and style—in short, with the vernacular—of their intended audiences. It was to such preachers that Humbert of Romans primarily directed his instruction. Because preaching is ultimately a spoken form, the transition from Latin to vernacular involved not simply linguistic translation but the connection with and access to an audience without which any rhetorical exercise is severely impaired. Later complaints about “English Latin” and the mockery of preachers’ Latinate speech in works such as Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale or the morality plays show how much resentment was aroused by preachers, including friars, who failed to learn the “common touch” in their manner of speaking.¹³ It is that failure and resentment that the early mendicant handbooks seem designed to avoid. Their approach to the preacher’s work of translation indicates that they recognized the interdependence of lay and clerical, Latin and vernacular cultures in the spoken, interactive context of preaching—an attitude that is clearly present in Humbert’s text.

In a chapter titled “On the speech of the preacher” (De loquela praedicatoris), Humbert addresses, obliquely, the relationship of Latin and vernacular. He first notes the preacher’s need to be able to speak clearly, citing the example of Moses and Aaron. His next observation makes reference to Pentecost, and at this point we might expect specific attention to problems of translation and the move from Latin to the vernacular Humbert’s point, however, is less direct. He says that the preacher should have an “abundance” of language: “If the early preachers were given many languages for the purpose of preaching, so that they might have abundant words for everyone,” he asks, “how unbecoming is it when a preacher is lacking in words, whether on account of a lack of memory, or a lack of Latinity, or a lack of vernacular speech [or “common speech,” vulgaris loquutionis], and so forth?”¹⁴ Here Latin and the vernacular appear as equally necessary to the work of preaching; the lack of either handicaps the preacher. This brief indication that “speaking in tongues” is the job of the preacher is the only mention of linguistic issues in the passage; Humbert is interested in the preacher’s language primarily as an element of the preacher’s speech.¹⁵ Other desirable qualities he goes on to discuss, apparently equivalent to the importance of ease in various languages, include sonority of voice, a manner of speaking that is easy to follow and well-paced, a simple style, and finally, “prudence in speaking of diverse things to diverse people” (prudentiam in loquendo diversa diversis).¹⁶ While such “prudence” is often cited as the reason for speaking simply to the simple, it turns out that what Humbert has in mind is an appropriate message; the audiences he envisions are defined not as lay or clerical but as the good, the wicked, the timid, the wrathful, and so forth.¹⁷ For Humbert, that is, linguistic matters are only one, subsidiary aspect of the preacher’s need to make his speech attractive and appropriate to whatever audience he may be addressing.

While Thomas’s instructions, then, are for preachers who are already connected to their audiences by language and common experience and who may therefore need to maintain more distance in order to shore up their institutional authority, Humbert writes for those who have the advantage and authority of distance but lack the immediate connection of a parish priest to his flock.¹⁸ In neither case is the linguistic issue of the vernacular much in evidence. What is visible in both texts is an awareness of vernacularity as part of a balance between different kinds of access that are equally necessary to the preacher’s task.

The Common Ground of Exempla

The connection between preacher and audience created by vernacularity and the problems this could raise are particularly evident in the preacher’s use of exempla and similitudes.¹⁹ It is often noted in preaching manuals and collections of exempla that such “concrete” means of persuasion are particularly appropriate for laypeople. As J.-C. Schmitt says, the form and use of exempla “rest on a veritable anthropology, or at least on the sense that the clergy has of a certain specificity of‘popular’ culture. This awareness is the condition of effective preaching: to people who for the most part are considered ‘rural,’ ‘lesser,’ ’simple,’ ‘unlearned,’ one must speak of concrete things, ‘physicalities,’ ‘external things,’ ‘deeds,’ without using the subtleties of speculative language.”²⁰ This audience is usually distinguished with clerical loftiness from a more learned audience to whom one may speak directly of higher things.

Many modern readings of the cultural role of exempla strongly emphasize the depth of the divide that the use of example supposedly illustrates. Larry Scanlon has argued that the exemplum was “a narrative enactment of cultural authority” and that, in the context of a sermon to a lay audience, “there is virtually no social permeability between exemplarist and audience. There are simply two distinct groups, the clerical, (scientes, erudites) on one side, and the lay (rudes, simplices) on the other.”²¹ Schmitt seems to agree: “The exemplum introduces into the sermon the realistic and agreeable note of a story that in all respects breaks up the general mode of expression in the sermon and seems to establish a furtive complicity between the preacher and his audience. But let there be no mistake: far from being isolated, [the exemplum] is linked to all the other arguments, and the momentary rupture that it introduces reinforces again the ideological function of the sermon, the speech of authority.”²² In both these instances the admission of connection between preacher and audience is subordinated to an assertion of difference that echoes the “rudes, simplices” rhetoric of exempla collections and sermon manuals.

Other scholarly readings, however, remind us that the repeated references in preaching texts to the simple, the unlearned, or the rustic—terms that emphasize the divide between the clergy and their audiences—ignore the fact that exempla, like vernacularity more generally, did reflect a certain connection between the supposedly learned preacher and his supposedly unlearned flock.²³ Schmitt notes that the medieval preacher “finds himself constrained in a sense by the necessities of his ‘exemplary’ pedagogy to involve himself in the multiple networks of oral narrativity,” and David d’Avray points out that the use of “extended comparisons or analogies … is one of the mental habits or customs which most influenced the directions which the thinking of preachers followed in the thirteenth century and after.”²⁴ Thus to suggest, as Schmitt does, that the medieval preacher was “constrained” by the need to use exempla is to overlook the ways in which such techniques were at least as much a way to cross the divide between simplices and clerici, between Latin and vernacular, as a way to maintain it.²⁵ This is reflected in the fact that preachers, who were of necessity clerics, are certainly not above using concrete instances to make their points; both Thomas’s and Humbert’s texts are filled with such comparisons. It is worth remembering in this context that not all the clergy were equally learned and that many of them no doubt shared their audiences’ cultural interests. Indeed, Caesarius of Heisterbach’s famous anecdote about the preacher who woke his drowsing flock with the teaser “There was a certain king, called Arthur” is told of a monastic audience (the monks of Heisterbach).²⁶ Here the ultimate symbol of roman—a worldly genre named for the worldly language in which it was created—is shown to appeal to the “learned” just as he might to the “simple.” While the clergy were eloquent on the subject of the laity’s reliance on externalities and historiae, they themselves were by no means always above such a taste.

If the clergy’s use and appreciation of exempla could suggest one important area of convergence between them and the laity, the need for verisimilitude in exempla suggests a further connection. While, on the one hand, the preacher’s ability to guarantee his story merely by telling it was a sign of his authoritative status, the story also had to have verisimilitude, a recognizable relation to experience. As Humbert of Romans puts it, “care should be taken that exempla be of sufficient authority [competentis auctoritatis], lest they be scorned, and realistic [verisimilia], so that they will be believed, and that they contain something instructive [aliquam aedificationem], lest they be put forth in vain”; the ultimate requirement for exempla is spiritual usefulness, but authority and verisimilitude are seen as essential to their functioning.²⁷ As does the preacher, these tales owe a dual allegiance: to the authority that validates them but also to the experience that makes them acceptably “realistic” examples. The former demonstrates the preacher’s participation in the learned culture of books and tradition; the latter demonstrates his participation in the vernacular culture he shares with his audience.

Nor is experience at issue only in the content of exempla; it also shapes the preacher’s use of them. Jacques de Vitry observes approvingly that some preachers “knew by experience how much benefit the laity and simple people derive from such narrative examples, not only as edification but as relaxation.”²⁸ Jacques’s appeal to “experiencia” is not an uncommon move in preaching manuals, where the phrase “experiencia docet” is frequently invoked, particularly in the context of audience-preacher interaction. The observation of the Franciscan Francesc Eiximenis that “familiarity breeds contempt, as experience teaches” neatly combines received wisdom with the claims of personal knowledge.²⁹ There were certainly plenty of authoritative accounts of how preachers should deal with their flocks, but it appears that in considering the fine points of personal interaction, and the preacher’s need to negotiate his status with an audience rather than assuming it, experience was felt to be an equally important teacher. As Siegfried Wenzel has pointed out, “experience” and “authority” as categories of argument in medieval sermons are not in opposition but rather are mutually reinforcing.³⁰ The authority of experience is not divorced from the world of learning any more than the authority of learning is divorced from the world of experience. The preacher is the medium for both, personifying for his congregation the institutional knowledge and authority that must work through an individual, and through a vernacular.

In addition to the theoretical issues raised by exempla, there was the simple issue of performance. The preacher, unlike most of his congregation, had access to exempla in their “abstracted,” usually Latin, form—that is, as elements of collections without any context.³¹ It was he who made the transition from the universal to the particular and from Latin to the vernacular. Scanlon notes that the flexibility of exempla as presented in collections, so that they could be used on various occasions, “sets the preacher apart from his audience even as he establishes common ground with them,” since it marks his association with a culture that they can only reach through him.³² But this transition from the general to the specific inevitably involved the preacher in both sides of the equation and demanded his participation in “networks of oral narrativity,” his ability not merely to convey doctrine but to make that doctrine live.³³ For an exemplum to be effective, various authors assert, it must be put across well. As Jacques de Vitry says, “proverbs, similitudes and everyday examples [vulgaria exempla] … cannot be expressed in writing as they can by gesture and word and the manner of speaking, nor do they move or rouse the audience in the mouth of one person as they do in the mouth of another.”³⁴ And Humbert, in De habundancia exemplorum, notes that exempla require a style all their own and politely hints that not every preacher is equally good at presenting them: those who “may perhaps not have a pleasing narrative style,” he says, “should not give up a means [of teaching] in which they are gifted for one in which they are not.”³⁵ More than some other forms of instruction, the exemplum was a kind of dead letter until the preacher brought it to life.³⁶ Despite his access to the “abstracted” exemplum, he participated fully and crucially in its transformation into a concrete, embodied form of instruction, and that transformation, if successfully enacted, demonstrated his ability to assimilate to his audience in some way, to speak to them with verisimilitude; like his exempla, he must appear “real.”³⁷

Thus, although the “rupture” that the exemplum represents in a sermon may ultimately serve to reinforce the ideological import of the rest of the sermon, it exacts a price for doing so. By marking a point of “complicity,” as Schmitt puts it, a moment of identification between preacher and audience, the use of exempla implicitly addresses the preacher’s relationship to his authority and raises the question of how, and indeed whether, he is set apart from his audience. The same is true of vernacularity more generally: the preacher’s ability to address his congregation in the “common language” meant not only his ability to speak French, Italian, or English but also his ability to use exempla, proverbs, and other “common speech” to get his message across. To form a connection the preacher had, to a certain extent, to make himself like his audience—or rather, to acknowledge and exploit his existing likeness to them.

Walking the Walk: The Preacher as Common Man

The ambiguous relationship of the preacher’s two allegiances can be seen also in Humbert’s De eruditione, in a section not on formal preaching but on how to make “private conversation” edifying. In the previous chapter “Against preachers who, in familiar conversation, say useless things [vana], as worldly people do,” Humbert has been holding forth on the wickedness of “worldly speech” (linguam mundi).³⁸ It is clear that “worldly” here does not equate with the vernacular. While one of Humbert’s arguments against worldly speech is that if schoolboys who lapse out of Latin into the vernacular are punished, preachers who lapse into useless speech should be still more severely chastised, another notes that just as preachers “should not abandon heavenly language for earthly [linguam caelestem propter linguam mundi], so a Frenchman, wherever he may go, does not easily abandon his own language for another, on account of the nobility of his language and his fatherland.”³⁹ Vernacular speech, then, can be either earthly or heavenly, just as Latin can.⁴⁰ The schoolboy example, moreover, implies that worldly speech is the “vernacular” of the clergy, who must be trained into the practice of heavenly speech—a perhaps unintentional equation that acknowledges both the preacher’s human fallibility and the constructed, learned quality of his role as preacher.⁴¹

Although Humbert criticizes “worldly speech,” he recognizes that it can be useful at times. His chapter on private conversation emphasizes again the need to consider what, when, to whom, and how one speaks, and it admits that “sometimes one should speak holy words, sometimes tell good exempla, and sometimes even use some secular words.”⁴² Later he clarifies this need, saying that secular words may sometimes be used “for the purpose of a certain conformity” (propter quamdam … conformitatem) with the people addressed.⁴³ If even secular speech is occasionally permitted for good ends, surely the “conformity” with an audience marked by the vernacular—like the “furtive complicity” created by exempla—is one of the preacher’s strengths and ultimately one of the things that in turn promotes the audience’s imitation of him, their adoption of the preacher’s “forma.”⁴⁴

This is not to deny that a strong distinction remained, and was promoted, between clergy and laity, Latin and vernacular, learned and unlearned in many cases, or that there was a cultural investment in regarding the laity as simple and unlearned by comparison with the clergy. But even when those seemingly opposed categories were used, they could be deployed in ways that demonstrate the complexity of their relationship. We see this in a sermon delivered by Stephen Langton near the beginning of the preaching revival. The sermon takes as its theme “Attendite uobis et uniuerso gregi” (drawing on Acts 20:28) and instructs its clerical audience on the responsibilities of their office.⁴⁵ Partway through the sermon, after an extended discussion of Cain and Abel that gives a biblical rationale for the preacher’s responsibility to his flock, Langton changes his approach:

Let me also speak in an everyday manner [uulgariter] for those who are more simple [simpliciores]: notice with what great veneration simple and unlearned laypeople [simplices laici et ydiote] prepare for Easter, with what punishments they afflict their bodies, what fasts, prayers, and vigils; they are ornamented as it were with heavenly pearls, so that they might participate in the Lord’s Supper. What Easter is to them, almost any day is to you, and therefore consider carefully by their example what you ought to do, lest what befalls a lying people should befall you.⁴⁶

While this passage clearly makes a distinction between clergy and laity, Langton’s use of “simpliciores” and “simplices” in the same sentence seems to imagine clerics who are not so far from their flocks and indeed teaches those clerics with the kind of method—appeal to everyday experience—that was often advocated for laypeople. Moreover he encourages the audience to attend to the admirable example of pious preparation offered by the laity, reversing the more usual injunctions to laypeople that they should imitate the clergy. Langton is sensitive to the diversity of his clerical audience throughout, ending his discourse with the announcement, “I wish to conclude with an everyday example for the simple [simplices]” and a brief similitude about a merchant. Here there is a distinct sense of the clergy and laity existing along a spectrum of simplicitas, as it were, across which the preacher needs to range in his attempts to reach all of his audience.

The use of vernacular, then, can bring out similarities between clergy and laity as well as marking their differences. And if some writers seem to concede the use of exempla, the vernacular, or other means of connection as a regrettable necessity, there are other descriptions that actively valorize such connection. One of these is the repeated story of the unlearned preacher whose similitudes or exempla are persuasive where the words of a learned preacher were not. Christoph Maier relates one version of this exemplum, about the preaching of the crusade in a village: A papal legate, unsuccessful in persuading the populace, eventually called on the unlearned village priest (sacerdos simplicissimus scripture et litterature), who reluctantly agreed to take his place and proceeded to convince almost everyone without use of scriptural authority, “with simplicity by showing a good example” (simplicitate boni exempli ostencio). The preacher used the familiar image of threshing and winnowing chaff from grain to tell, as it were, an exemplum involving himself and the other clerics present: the papal legate, he said, had threshed the crowd like grain and prepared them, and it was now his own job to winnow them and find who was chaff and who would go on crusade.⁴⁷ As the story shows, the anonymous preacher did a masterful job of including himself and his parishioners in a framework of recognizable experience that was also a manifestation of doctrinal truth (a tactic identical to that used by Stephen Langton with his audience of priests). The papal legate in Maier’s exemplum may have been using the vernacular, but clearly he was not speaking the audience’s language.⁴⁸ The tale also reflects the desire for holy simplicity that is a persistent thread in medieval Christianity and that mitigates the negative aspects of referring to an audience as “simplices.”⁴⁹

Conceptions of a preacher’s contact with “the people,” then, involve style and genre as much as language—the preacher’s need not just to speak in the vernacular but to talk the talk with his audience. Other advice offered to preachers extends this need to understand, use, and respect vernacular or “common” modes of communication to the preacher’s behavior in the world, his ability to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. In these contexts, as in those that address language and genre, nonclerical culture and nonclerical people are understood to be shrewd and deserving of respect: they may be simplices, but they’re not stupid.⁵⁰ A preacher’s good behavior reflects well on the church and maintains his institutional position, but it also gains him the personal respect of his audience, without which all the institutional backing in the world is useless.