beloved, dearly

   The conventional form of address by a priest to his congregation at, e.g. a wedding ceremony. The Book of Common Prayer also begins with ‘Dearly beloved brethren’ in the exhortation for the Morning Prayer. A Kind of Loving, by Stan Barstow, has: ‘The organ stops and there’s dead quiet for a minute. Then the vicar chimes up. “Dearly beloved, we are gathered together to join this man and this woman in holy matrimony…”.’ The Bell, by Iris Murdoch, has a man saying to another: ‘Since you’re in a hurry we’ll cut out the hymns and prayers and go straight on to the sermon. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. Dearly beloved, we are come of a fallen race…’ ‘Beloved’ itself would formerly have been used in impassioned declarations of love between men and women, but the word now has a very old-fashioned ring. It is sometimes used sarcastically by a male or female speaker to a love-partner. In Norman Mailer’s An American Dream, a woman who is telling a male friend about a previous love-affair remarks: ‘It was kind of carnal, beloved.’