Why trespasses?

Friend and correspondent Mr. Philbin weighs in on Sunday's blog entry concerning the enduring popularity of the Olde Englishe thys and thines ("and you forgot Art," he adds, "as in who ART in Heaven"). He writes:

"Fred: You gave us the KJV translation, but I notice it asks for forgiveness of our debts as we forgive our debtors. BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT PEOPLE SAY. They say 'forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass.' So if that didn't come from the KJV translation, why is it so ingrained in us?"

To which I say, Well, you dirty dog, Philbin! You ... that's actually a darned good question. 

And thank Heaven it is one dealt with online by someone more knowledgeable than I am. 

Richard Beck on the Experimental Theology blog addressed this in a short item ten years ago,  The source of the popular version of the Lord's Prayer, which includes that King James Version thees and thys, is the Anglican (i.e. Episcopalian) church's Book of Common Prayer, the compilation of prayers and rites going back to 1549. The translation of debts as trespasses, Beck notes, came from the 1526 William Tyndale translation of the Bible, a translation that predated the original King James Version by 85 years. 

No doubt Tyndale had a great influence on the KJV editors, but they did not use his same translation of the word for Aramaic words for debt and debtors. 

As for the Book of Common Prayer, that was a step I should not have let out when I addressed this topic. It is impossible to overstate the importance on that book on our culture, especially the 1662 edition that held sway for more than three hundred years. That's where we get the version of the Lord's Prayer people in America know best to this day (although God is said to be "Who art in heaven" not "Which art in heaven" as in that book). 

The Book of Common Prayer is also where we get the marriage rites seen in all the movies ("Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this Man and this Woman in holy Matrimony; which is an honourable estate, instituted of God in the time of man's innocency...") as well as the graveside rite ("Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ" as dirt is shoveled on). You'd think everyone in the movies who dies or gets married, who is not specially designated something else, is an Episcopalian, although only about one percent of American adults identify as such. 

Okay, Mr. Philbin, you got me on that one; I hope you enjoyed your trespass on this blog. Now hit the road before I'm led unto the temptation to smack ya one!

Woah is me.

The word Whoa has been around since the fifteenth century as a command to stand still ("as to a draft animal"). I want to make it perfectly clear that this is the way it has been spelled since it descended from whoo in Middle English. And the meaning in casual discourse (popularized by Bill & Ted of excellent adventure fame) is exactly that -- like, "Stand still! I have to take a moment to comprehend all this!"

So, as I said, it has always been whoa, with the H after the W, as in who or which or why or where.

Until now. 

Universal's theme parks have made the misspelling the crucial word in its ad campaign, which has been going on for two years now. Maybe that's to be expected for an outfit that is letting literal dummies be its spokescreatures. 

Woah oh oh it's stupid.

The so-called Hit the Woah challenge, covered with gusto (if not shame) by KCEN, includes the word misspelled on its Chyron. To be fair, they didn't invent this challenge, and the misspelling may have come from some other dingdong.

They also don't know when to use double quotation marks.

And then there's this sports report on FoxNews.com, which is the kind of thing that lets Times readers sit back and say "Look at those idiots, with their football and their Fox News. We would never misspell 'whoa'! Ha! Ha!"

They would have a point.

I'm usually not one to poke fun at bad spellers. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. I'd hate to see my math skills on display for all the world. But the people screwing up here are supposedly professionals, people for whom language is their currency, and they can't check the dictionary?

Merriam-Webster usually backs down like the nancy-pants they are when so many knuckleheads start misspelling a word. Once a sort of critical mass of dopeyness arrives, rather than defend the truth, their editors throw up their red pencils and say "The people have spoken! The word has changed!" But not this time, or not yet at least.

There will be those who say that it doesn't matter -- the H in whoa is silent (but it is not, not really) and it doesn't matter where you put it. 

Well, I have one thing to say to that: 

Pardon the punctuation.

The wh in words like why or whoa is supposed to sound different than the w in womb or wood; it actually is an hw sound. Spelling whoa as woah would seem to indicate that it should be two syllables, like Noah, and it's not. Hey, dunderheads, if you think the H is silent, why not just leave it out? Woa! Or try it other places? Woha! Hwoa! Who         H!

If I were to adopt a secret identity, I think I would become the Yardstick Avenger. I'd sneak into the offices where the Universal campaign was devised and whack everyone responsible. I would not wackh anybody. The Yardstick of Doom would become legendary. I'm not saying this will happen, but you professional communicators out there had better start using your dictionaries. You have been wharned. 

📏📏📏📏📏

Coffee -- lifesaving beverage or menace?

Medical experts seem to disagree firmly and harshly over the question of whether coffee has health benefits. I just like the fact that when I have enough joe to function but not so much as to be jittery, I am in that sweet spot in which I am least likely to commit homicide. 

But that right there is one of the reasons some doctors land in the Anti camp -- is getting hooked in a stimulant-dependent cycle really a sign of anything that's healthy? Didn't Patient Zero (me) just say he might murder someone unless he got coffee? Is it really any better than qat, the stimulant that everyone in Somalia apparently lives on? 

The late P. J. O'Rourke in his classic All the Trouble in the World described his visit to Mogadishu in the 1990s. Somalia couldn't get any food into that pesthole of a country, but twenty planeloads of qat could somehow make it through from Kenya every day. "They start chewing before lunch but the high didn't kick in until about three in the afternoon. Suddenly our drivers would start to drive straight into potholes at full speed. Straight into pedestrians and livestock, too. We called it 'the qat hour.'" Is being addicted to coffee really any better than being addicted to qat? 

Well, I hope so. I've been drinking coffee since I was a child but never got arrested for DWC (driving while caffeinated). The one time I really OD'd on caffeine it required a bunch of NoDoz, which rendered me not only awake and wired but also unable to sit still and do any of the schoolwork I had been planning to do, which is why I was jacked up in the first place. I've never gotten that bad on just coffee.

The anti-java squad has been at it a long time, as the Coffee Mill site breaks down for us. The Latter-day Saints frown on caffeine and nicotine. I've heard about attempts in the Catholic Church to ban it as a devil's brew from the Muslim world, but Pope Clement VIII supposedly tried it and liked it, and that was that. 

I believe that story is probably not true, because if it were so, people like my wife would be calling him St. Clement.

Even many Muslims once considered coffee a fiendish drink, since it was not mentioned in the Koran, and yet they became its biggest Old World enthusiasts. 

You may say, That just proves people like it, not that it's healthy. The fact that people will frown on it until they start chugging it reveals it is dangerously addictive, because it converts people as soon as they get that caffeine buzz!

I understand that -- and coffee was an acquired taste for me. I didn't become a fan because I thought it was delicious from that first sip. I had to keep at it, just as with beer and whiskey and cigarettes. That doesn't mean coffee's unhealthy -- Brussels sprouts and beets were acquired tastes for me, too. Red Bull, on the other hand, despite its caffeine has a taste I cannot acquire; however many times I've tried it, it still tastes like licking a high school lab table, or at least I suspect that's what it's supposed to taste like. Not a flavor found in nature. 

But let's cede the point that there may be a downside to getting caught in that up-down stimulant wash cycle. Would it be better to have never had the noble bean at all? Less stressful on the heart, the brain, the delicate blood vessels? 

Yeah. Maybe. The Mayo Clinic says coffee:

can temporarily raise blood pressure. Women who are pregnant, trying to become pregnant or breastfeeding need to be cautious about caffeine. High intake of boiled, unfiltered coffee has been associated with mild increase in cholesterol levels.

BUT! They also say:

Coffee may offer some protection against:

Parkinson's disease

Type 2 diabetes

Liver disease, including liver cancer

Heart attack and stroke

Some pretty serious study has shown that coffee can inhibit the replication of the hepatitis virus in the liver. So there! 

I don't have much choice but to drink coffee at my house anyway. My wife is a strong believer in the Golden Rule and a humongous fan of the bean, and the best way she can think to do unto you what she would want done unto herself is to give you a cup of coffee. Bad day? Flat tire? Broke your leg? Have some coffee. That's just how we roll here. With a travel mug, of course.  

Missing thee.

It's never going to stop being strange to me, how in American churches we spend 99% of the Mass speaking like twentieth-century humans, and then the Lord's Prayer comes up and we're back in the 1600s. "Hallowed be Thy name...."

I think about this from time to time, mainly because I wonder:

1) How did "thee" and "thy" and "thine" and "thou" get shoved aside by "you" and "your" and "yours" and, uh, "you"? You was once the plural form of thee. Nowadays if we want to do a plural version of you we're forced to say youse, you lot, y'all, all y'all, and even sillier things, depending on where you are. (Contrary to popular belief, even the Amish don't use thee, thou, and thy when speaking English.)

2) Why have we stuck with the old construction on the Our Father (and some other ancient prayers like the Hail Mary), but not elsewhere in Mass? I don't know of any churches that use "thee" and "thy" except in the Lord's Prayer, and more modern ones have broken the tradition. Not Catholics! 

3) Is it dumb to keep theeing and thying when we don't speak that way normally? 

Courtesy of BibleInfo

Okay, so, first: What happened to thee? Merriam-Webster asked that musical question, "Why Did We Stop Using 'Thou'?" To quote from their piece:

Formerly we used thou as the second person singular pronoun (which simply means that we would use thou to address another single person). Thee was used in the objective or oblique case (when referring to the object of a verb or preposition), and thou was used in the nominative (when indicating the subject of a verb).

The thing is, one couldn't go saying to the king, "Hey! Thou king!" For some reason the privilege of office -- maybe to stress that one was not just talking to the king, but to everyone in his army sworn to defend him as well -- required the plural. Ah, but as Old English became nuttin' but a cheese and Middle English took over, the democratization of the language brought You to the masses: 

Initially you was used to refer to a person of high social standing (such as royalty, who would be addressed as “your majesty”) but soon came to be used as well when speaking with a social equal.

While dabbling with the Society for Creative Anachronism in college, I learned the classic insult: "I do not bite my thumb at you, m'lord, I bite my thumb at thee." Thee's fightin' words! 

Aside from insults, thou was mostly used for either servants or the socially intimate, but that faded over time as well. 

Okay, so why do we still use the form for the Lord's Prayer? Tradition! 

In the original King James Version, in Matthew 6:9, when Jesus is preaching the Sermon on the Mount, it's rendered in English this way:

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

In Luke 11:1, the prayer is slightly different: 

And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth. Give us day by day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.

The King James translation was not the first translation of the Bible into English, but it was the premiere English-language Bible available between 1611 and 1769, so its impact had staying power. It was the Bible brought to the American Colonies. Further, when Benjamin Blayney created a revised translation for the Oxford University Press in 1769, he retained the thees and thous. In many houses, if there was any book at all, it was the KJV; if anyone heard any book read aloud anywhere, it was in church. So that's one way to nail down a particular manner of speech, even if the language is changing rapidly outside, by having the language reflected in the most crucial point of culture. 

As modern versions have arisen, using the current idioms such as you and yours, we have found that the thees and thys are so stuck in us culturally that it's hard to change. Even the US Conference of Catholic Bishops uses an updated text, and yet it's almost certain any American Catholic you know will go for the thees and thys. Heck, even people who know nothing of the Bible but have some cultural awareness of the faith will be theeing and thying when they think of the Our Father. 

So: Are we being dumb by using thy for the Our Father? If anything, is it an insult to call God by the singular pronoun, when we wouldn't have done that to Old English kings?

I'm not so sure, actually. We testify that there is "One God, the Father, the Almighty," who although the first of the Holy Trinity, is one God, not a pantheon. In that case, since His Son taught us the prayer to address His Father, it makes sense to not only use but insist on the singular pronoun for the Lord's Prayer. On the other hand, a prayer that addresses the entire Trinity would need to have the plural pronoun. The most prominent one of those is the Glory Be, or Gloria Patri, which names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but uses no pronouns. 

I've decided not to argue with anyone either way about this. People have gotten awfully weird about pronouns lately. 

Yes, we should use the updated language used in the very authorized Bible upon which our English-speaking church relies. But tradition is more important than ever in this era, an era that wants dearly to take every possible tradition, everything from longer ago than the nineties, burn it, and take a dump on the ashes. 

In England, the country that gave us the great King James Version of the Bible, Christians are a minority for the first time in 1500-odd years. What follows when a nation turns from faith in Christ is never good. At this juncture, we'd better hold on to all the great traditions we have. 

Be warned!

 

Like a fool, Gary checked the Notifications bell on LinkedIn when he was home alone.
He was rescued by firefighters two days later using a trained LinkedIn-sniffing dog.

Elf evaluation.

Don't judge me! There's a reason this wound up in my house, and consequently in my mouth. It wasn't intended, although I can't claim it was an accident, either. 

What happened was, I was at the checkout when I realized we were out of cereal. Right nearby was a wall full of Elf on the Shelf cereals by Kellogg's. I either had to give up my spot in line, get home with no cereal to show for it, or grab a box and hope for the best. And here we are. 

Kellogg's Elf on the Shelf cereal comes in three varieties: Hot Cocoa, Sugar Cookie, and North Pole Snow Creme, all with marshmallows. Precious few marshmallows and small. 

Why did I get the Snow Creme variety? Oh, who knows. Maybe it was the closest on the display? Nah, probably racism. Or maybe I wanted to know what the hell Snow Creme tastes like. I know what cocoa and sugar cookies taste like, but snow creme? YELLOW snow creme? (And green?)

Plus, what's this about it "magically" cooling your mouth as you eat? Got to see what that's all about. You seldom get an endothermic reaction from breakfast foods. 

The Web site says, "A flurry of frosted star pieces and mini marshmallows, each spoonful will remind you of creamy vanilla ice cream. It’s like taking a bite out of a sweet and tasty snowball!" Okay, well, I wouldn't have known it was supposed to taste like vanilla ice cream if they hadn't mentioned it; dry, the cereal tasted weird, like some alien simulacrum of vanilla. Milk helped bring out the ice-creamy flavor, but it was still a close call. I guess it might be considered a sweet and tasty snowball experience, except that 1) such a thing does not exist and 2) there was no detectable cooling of my mouth involved. 

I give this one a D -- just barely edible, so not a total failure. Mr. Breakfast's Cereal Project profiled the original sugar cookie variety, but didn't review it. It has its fans. The project hasn't caught up to this snowball variety yet. 

As for the Elf on the Shelf itself, I've never liked that little creep. It was introduced as "A Christmas Tradition" in 2005, albeit a funny kind of tradition that no one had ever heard of. Even the pickle on the tree has some genuine roots. But the smarmy elf snitch is just there to terrify children into behavior. 

Actually, that part is not the part that annoys me -- a parent gotta do what a parent gotta do, and 99% of the time a mom or dad giving a kid a good healthy scare saves them from getting into far scarier trouble down the road. 

The part that annoys me is the sneaky look on the little bastard's face. Oooooh, well, I'ma have to tell Santa, more in sorrow than anger. Oh, shut up, you little creep. You love your work.  

I'll leave you today with a thumbs-down to Kellogg's and a thumbs-up to whoever did this: 

What's so funny? Or is it?

David Burge (a.k.a Iowahawk) has presented an important rule for our consideration. Not the Clint rule; Eastwood hasn't thought anything was funny since Any Which Way You Can. I mean the rule enshrined now as Burge's Second Law:

But does this law stand up to the test?

I think we can agree that if you have to explain why something is funny, it is not, or at least is not going to be to the listener. Even if I think a joke is funny, if I have to explain it, any potential humor is going to dissipate in the heat of explanation. This can be understood with these simple formulae:

In the second example, we see that the larger the denominator (i.e., the more explanation is required), the smaller the value of the numerator (joke humor potential) will be. 

So is it funny? 

Let's look at the Babylon Bee item that sparked this attention from Ms. Makkai. Here's the link; return here to discuss.

And... it's okay. Not the Bee's best. No LOL here. There was no problem with comprehension; most of King's fans are probably not swayed by his dunderheaded political commentary, and yet he can't stop himself, the Twitter results showing none of the writer's polish and insight. It hits the mark, but is it funny? I fear this is a case of satire, and as we know: 

Satire = That Which Closes on Saturday Night

This is known as Kaufman's First Law. 

I also followed up with a look at Makkai's loooong thread tearing into the Bee's story, or actually just the headline shown; she had time to write a hundred tweets about this but not to take the two minutes (three, if she's actually a glue-sniffing parrot) to read the short piece. Based on what I saw, I think we can boil her main points down to these:

🤡 Headline long; no good 

🤡 F bombs funny; lack of F bombs less funny

🤡 K's are funny (this is known as Willy's Rejoinder, from Neil Simon's Sunshine Boys, before Simon stopped being funny -- was he hit by a van?)

Our thoughts for Thursday then are, contra Burge, sometimes explaining why something is not funny does not mean that the thing was funny. Inflating the denominator does not make the numerator larger. However, if there is still a large remainder (humor), then it was a pretty hot one. 

We can also see from this example that spending a good deal of time thrashing something for not being funny follows a wave pattern, wherein the self-satire rises to a certain height, then peters off in a dwindling return, a wave attenuation that comedians call the All right, already factor. 

And on that note, I'll bid you a happy Thursday and adieu.