I think that's actually a quote from a Latin classic about their civil wars -- "bella intestina" -- so it would come to a classicist's mind back then very quickly. Using the word "intestines" instead of guts or viscera? Not so much.
Anyway, there's a lot of stuff, talking about Paul's "I do what I don't want to" and about the wheat and the tares both being in the Church, which brings up intestine wars. It's very interesting to see.
Sounds like a desperate translator with a thesaurus too close at hand. "I need a three syllable word for 'internal.' And for some reason I can't use 'internal.'"
However, "intestine" as an adjective has the precise meaning of "internal" when concerning civil or governmental affairs. So, it's actually quite accurate.
Right. It's not that the word literally means the abdominal entrails and thus can be used by hack writers to refer metaphorically to other "internal" things (like Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV, I.I.12, "The intestine shock, and furious close of civil butchery"); rather, the word literally means "internal," and for that reason came to be used to refer to the innards of the body.
St Thomas' Episcopal Church in Houston was the graced locus of intestine singing both sublime, artful, and inspiring by the Choir of Men and Boys from Canterbury Cathedral tonight. How pauvre is our culture that we have to import such song every few years as a mere concert from afar where it has been an every-day part of their culture and worship life for fourteen hundred years. (I who have been a royalist since I was five years old, was delighted when they sang as their last selection, Handel's Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet Anointed Solomon King. The church was the womb of this intestine singing, carried out with great intestinal fortitude and aplomb!
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