A load of dolumbs

A couple months ago, a friend of mine and I noticed that the word verification mechanism at Blogger increasingly was using strings of characters that either were really words, or at least came close.

One of the more interesting logisms was dolumbs. I say this primarily because Brucker noted that dolumbs looks like a word, but means nothing. But as I contended, it's easy to deduce the meaning of such a logism in context, and trotted out several possible uses:

1. The crew was overcome by a severe case of dolumbs.
2. It was a difficult operation, but fortunately the patient had come to a state-of-the-art hospital where doctors had all the necessary equipment, even a set of dolumbs.
3. The salad bar was full of everything Freddie would need for his meal. There were plump red cherry tomatoes and mounds of grated cheese, the bins were heaped with mounds of croutons and delicious bacon bits. But when Freddie saw the dolumbs, he knew he truly had found the holy grail of salad bars.
4. "Whoa!" Pete cried, elbowing Vern in the chest. "Check out the dolumbs on that babe!"
5. The gym teacher was furious. He'd seen some useless students in his day, but this class had to be the biggest set of dolumbs he had ever come across in 36 years of public education.
6. "I might be a dolumb," thought Melvin, "but at least I'm no rathro like Kevin."

In each examples, the intended meaning is fairly obvious and easy to determine. As used, dolumbs means boredom or perhaps an illness; a piece of surgical equipment; something eaten with a salad; some aspect of a woman, presumably one that makes her attractive, although it could be something else, like jewelry or an article of clothing; an unimpressive or uninspiring student; and lastly, some undesirable appellation, like loser or dork. Interestingly, one could argue that the word refers to the same thing in all six sentences, though I have no idea what possibly could fit such a wide range of uses.

The truth of the matter, naturally, is that dolumbs is essentially meaningless because it is not a word. We can run it up one flagpole or another and assume a meaning from the way it flutters in the breeze, but a shift in the wind or the use of a different flagpole is all that it would take to wrench it away from that assumed meaning and send it blowing away.

It lacks the weight of a thousand years of usage to shape its definition; the force of the mass consent that defines the words contained in the English lexicon, the experience of hearing it and speaking it; and the vast tomes of poetry, drama, essays and other literature that give words meaning in any language. In short, it lacks the necessary context to be a real word, and not just a neologism.

I don't mean to belabor the point, but it's an important one. In the third example, Freddie recognized the eatery as the holy grail of salad bars. The Holy Grail refers to the legendary cup that Christ drank from at the Last Supper. A thousand years or so of English and Continental literature have established the Grail as the most sacred of relics, capable of bestowing immortality or other great treasures on anyone worthy enough to find it.

The weight of that literary, cultural, and historical context allows us to use the phrase holy grail in a metaphorical sense; i.e., this is the salad bar before all other salad bars. For the aficionado of salads, there is no better place to be than the restaurant with this salad bar.

The word even holds up to being used as a verb. Were I to write "Stephen has gone a'holy-grailing," most English speakers will grasp the sense immediately. Conversely, the meaning of "Holy Grail" is so fixed in our minds that a sentence like "Frank took his Holy Grail for a walk" is just nonsense. I might use Holy Grail in place of the word dog, just as a salesman might refer to mattresses as dog kennels, but the misuse of the term throws the meaning of the sentence into doubt and imbues the discussion with a surreal, Pythonesque feel.

If this is true of words we speak, it is even truer of the stories we fashion from them. We understand stories firstly from the context of our own experience. In the case of Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol," I've encountered people whose reactions ranged from the intended enthusiasm for Scrooge's redemption to scoffing at the story for empty-headed sentimentalism, to disapproval at its liberal message that Scrooge should pay Bob Cratchitt any more than what he is contracted to pay him.

The strangest take on it I ever heard was a psychosexual one: that Scrooge didn't need the spirits of Christmas to change him, he just needed to have sex. (No, I'm not making that up.)

Aswineherder in a remote South American village would have no reaction at all. If he had no knowledge of Victorian England and Christmas, or if his ghost lore allows no room for helpful spirits, the story is likely to be completely meaningless to him. So meaningless, in fact, that it would be impossible to translate it directly.

It's possible for us to derive some meaning from our own context, and if we're close enough to the source of the story, we might even get a semblance of the meaning, but the further we are from the philological, historical and cultural roots of the story, the more likely we are to get it wrong. One dramatic example of this is recounted in the missions biography "Peace Child."

In this story, author and missionary Don Richardson explains that among the Sawi people whom he was living with, treachery was seen as an admirable behavior. Someone who could act like your friend and then destroy you, was hailed as a hero by his clan.

Thus, when Richardson presented the story of Jesus to the Sawi people, the man they admired wasn't Jesus. It was the traitor Judas Iscariot, hardly the hero Richardson had hoped they would embrace. (Richardson eventually discovered a meaningful cultural context among the Sawi that enabled him to reinterpret the story to them so that they perceived the same inherent meaning that he did.)

The Sawi case presents an extreme and obvious example of missed contextual clues, but if we're willing to admit it, the truth is that we ourselves often misunderstand the stories and misconstrue the message of the Bible ourselves. We do not speak the languages the Bible was written in, we lack the premodern mindset of its authors, and we do not share the cultural mores that they took for granted.

Nor, ultimately, do we possess a knowledge of the extrabiblical literature that helped to shape the mindset of the Bible writers, such as the histories of the kings of Judah. When we do possess such literature, we rarely avail ourselves of it. Relatively few American Christians bother to read the book of Enoch, even though the book of Jude quotes it by name.

One of the greatest problems the American church has in terms of biblical literacy is our assumed familiarity with the text. We all know the Haggadah, how Moses came to Pharaoh and demanded that he free the Israelites, and when Pharaoh refused, how God struck him with a series of plagues. Many Americans would be surprised to discover the significant role that Aaron has in this story, just as they might be surprised to discover that Pharaoh would have been Moses' uncle and not his brother.

It goes on from there. Aside from the many ways Hollywood has mined the rich vein of Bible stories, there are many stories that have been told and retold so frequently that they have been reduced to children's tales, with the result that religious folk feel we know not only the story but the moral we're supposed to draw from it.

Why were Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego saved from the furnace? Because God rescues people who are true to him. Why was Joseph treating his brothers so harshly when they came to Egypt to buy grain? Because he wanted to test them to see if they had become as mature as he had always been. Who is the Parable of the Prodigal Son about? Clearly, it's about the son who squanders his inheritance in a faroff land and then comes to his senses and comes home.

In each of those three stories, those lessons  I have just shared are commonly taught, but it's fairly clear from the actual biblical passages that none of those is the main point.

Perhaps the biggest loser in this too-familiar approach to hermeneutics is Jesus himself. Among evangelicals in particular, the message of Jesus has been reduced to a simple conversion appeal that is shocking in its absence from the actual teachings of Christ found in the gospels.

The repent/confess/believe message has been preached so widely and so thoroughly in America that we often miss the heart of his message, which was a call to a much deeper spiritual revolution than one of simply changing where we go to church and which label we affix to our set of religious beliefs.

What we need -- all of us -- is to return to a sound basis for Bible study. Christianity has bigger PR problems than the Exxon Valdez because of the boorishness of many of our appointed representatives, but we also have bigger credibility problems than a town hall of politicians in no small part because we've forgotten how to read a text intelligently.

That's been fairly evident the past few weeks as the scientific community has taken time to mark the 200th anniverary of the birth of Charles Darwin. There's scarcely a news article without a snark about the creationists who insist on reading Genesis 1-3 as a scientific treatise on the origin of species and the formation of planets.

That text is beautiful, affirming the transcendent qualities of God and declaring the value of the life of each ecosystem, from the smallest vernal pool to the deeps of the ocean, but let's remember what it is. It's a myth, doing what all great myths do: explaining the relationships among humanity, the world, and the creator of both. The text continues to relate the moral dimension of God, that he approves of certain behaviors and not of others, and it warns that walking out of faith with God can have disastrous consequences.

These are, in all probability, not stories that originated with the Hebrews, although the Hebrew Scriptures reinterpret each one in a manner that is positively revolutionary. The ancient Sumerians told a story virtually identical to the Noah tale found in Genesis, but there the Deluge was brought about by the vagaries of a god who was tired of the noise people made while he was trying to sleep.

The Babylonians told the story of the world's creation as the result of a conflict between Tiamat and Marduk. Only in the Hebrew Scriptures is there a depiction of a God outside the world, who calls it into being by his own authority, and who regards the people he has put there with affection rather than with a tolerance that often borders on annoyance.

There's a lot about the Bible that can be understood just by reading it casually, and I wish many more Christians would do at least that much. But any responsible reading is going to involve a fair amount of study.

To know what the authors were saying, we need to study more ourselves about their values, their beliefs, and their other literature. It may take our faith to places we never imagined we would go, but in the end it's all worth it.

Otherwise, we might as well just be reading a page full of dolumbs.



Copyright © 2009 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Profanity

I wonder if Jesus ever swore.

Many Christians will say no, and cite Colossians 3:8 by way of argument: "But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips," as the prooftext against profanity. I can't picture Jesus using words like "bunt," "sickhead," or "flocksuckers" when he's talking to or about other people, and certainly I can't see him talking in a crude sort of way about women.

But I've often wondered if "filthy language" in this context refers more to crude or vulgar language rather than to profanity or cussing. The Greek word in Colossians 3:8 that some translations render as "filthy speech" is aischrologia. The aischro part can mean base or filthy, but that's hardly the same thing as saying, "Damnit!" when you realize that the wood you've been working with for the last eight hours has begun to split, and now you have to start that chair all over again.

For the same reason, it's not the same thing as saying "Oh, shit," when you realize that everything just went way down south for you, and the next several hours, if not days, are going to be fairly stressful and difficult.

The issue isn't word choice, although if the range of your vocabulary is limited to the F-bomb, you desperately need a dictionary. It's the thought and intent behind the word that determines whether language is filthy, or not.

When Jesus talks about righteousness, it's clear he's concerned with what's going on in a person's heart far more than with the externals of what they are doing or saying. A person whose vocabulary is limited to expletives may not be fit for polite society, but I wasn't aware that polite society is what we hope to be fit for.


For a rather tongue-in-cheek essay on this, take a look at Toward An Evangelical Theology Of Cussing.

Building vocabulary one fake word at a time

Every time you say "disencluttered," God kills
a puppy. Please think of the puppies.

I was perhaps 10 minutes into a phone call with my brother Zero when he mentioned "disencluttering" something.

"What did you say?" I asked.

"Disenclutter."

"Sounds like a Bushism," I said.

"It is not a Bushism!" Zero insisted. "It's a real world." I wondered momentarily if that meant that he had taken the word clutter and loved it so much that its eyes had fallen off, and its fur was all worn away, like some linguistic Velveteen Rabbit, and then he added: "It comes up on Google and everything."

At this point I appealed to a nonexistent language snobbery on my part, and insisted that if it doesn't show up in the Oxford English Dictionary, then it's not a real word.

Zero wasn't moved. "It's a real word," he said again, clutching that mantra like a security blanket when the night is closing in and monsters stir unpleasantly beneath the beds of little children. "It shows up on Google."

Late Sunday night, I checked, and sure enough, disenclutter does show up on Google. What Zero failed to disclose was that his site is the only place this alleged word appears. At least it was. I expect a Google search soon will turn up this page as well, with the following notation: Zero is a goober.

Still, I don't blame him for failing to disclose on the phone that the word is his concoction. If I were responsible for such an abberation, I doubt I'd be all that quick to draw attention to it either.

On his site, he asks that readers add the word on their own web pages so that its usage will proliferate. Note that I have done so here. After all, what are brothers for?

Deconstructing authority

There are three things we sometimes lump under that one umbrella we call authority.

There's actual authority, which God gives according to his pleasure; there's respect, which people give to one another; and there's power, which people take for themselves.

Sometimes these line up, but not always. You'll remember that Jesus but lacked earthly power and often missed the respect of people around him. It did nothing to affect his authority to perform miracles, forgive sin, or speak the truth with power.

Similarly, men like Al Capone have had a great deal of power, but they were pretending to authority that had never been given them and, in the end, they often discover that they really don't have the respect they think they do.

Pat Robertson has the respect of many evangelicals and Pentecostals because of the man he was and the things he has done in the past -- though you'll note that this has been eroded greatly in the last several years -- but he lacks any substantial authority.

miracles

I'm tired of hearing people talk about miracles that are mundane and ordinary. Unless it's something that defies all reason, like parting the Red Sea, it's not a miracle, it's just good luck.

biblically, miracles often require some measure of obedience: Naaman has to take seven baths in the Jordan River to be cured of leprosy, Moses has to throw a handful of dust into the air for gnats to appear; and so on -- but miracles properly speaking reflect a break with science as we know it, and are not a "little bit extra to put us over the top."

Real miracles are in short supply, as are clear and undeniable answers to prayer, and I don't fault anyone for disbelieving stories of them. I've heard unprovable stories of healings and such from the missions field (and a host of frauds from snakes like H*nn), but most often the term "miracle" is misused by Christians as a synonym for fortuitous coincidence.

As a wordsmith, I maintain that it cheapens the word "miracle" to use it for any incident where God may have put his thumb on the scale and tilted probability to favor one person or another, just as it cheapens the word "hero" to use it to describe someone just because he plays basketball well or thinks he's hot stuff for being a popular singer or rap artist. True heroes remain measures of character and not just of accomplishment, and true miracles beggar explanation.

oxymorons

We all know what oxymorons are. They're concepts or statements (usually from up above) that are plainly self-contradictory. In an age as cynical as ours, it's almost a sport to find oxymorons in everyday usage, such as
"three easy steps." Never mind the obvious ones like "jumbo shrimp"; just for the fun of it, I've compiled here a list of some of the most common honest-to-goodness oxymorons seen in everyday life:

• train schedule
• intelligence agencies
• holy war
• civil war
• Microsoft Works
• journalistic integrity
• congressional ethics
• common sense
• funny pages
• user-friendly
• childproof
• compassionate conservative
• humble opinion
• business ethics
• postal service
• tech support

Snow chickens: your new word of the day

Snow chickens.

This is the phrase my wife has coined for drivers who won't get behind the wheel of the car, at the slightest intimation of flurries. This is an overdue phrase in Nova Bastille, which endures yearly prognostications that we're all going to perish beneath 50 feet of snow and glaciers six miles long.

Your assistance is appreciated in getting this term into the dictionary.

See also "rain chickens," for a related species of driver.

Spelling reform? Not for me, thanks

Back when I was teaching Evangeline how to read, I was struck by how many written words you "just have to remember" how to pronounce.

No wonder spelling -- and reading -- can be tough. You have to memorize practically half the written language. So I guess it's not surprising that there are groups that push for spelling reform of written English on a massive scale, to boost literacy and to ease the torment of spelling.


It's a long and storied history. No less august a man than President Theodore Roosevelt, who reportedly had spelling problems himself, pushed Congress a hundred years ago to adopt some 300 simplified spellings, such as thru and program. Congress wouldn't budge, but a number of those simpler spellings became the accepted American spellings anyway, from curb and jail, to the words we dropped the British U from, such as honor, color, rancor and armor.

Sight words, which defy "standard" spelling rules, come by the truckload in written English. Some follow auxiliary rules of their own, like silent E, the -ight ending, and "I before E, except after C, or when sounded like A as in neighbor and weigh," but plenty don't.

Depending on the region, T can be pronounced like ch in tree or like D in kindergarten; the D in dress sounds like a J, making a phonetic "jress"; and almost no one ever pronounces the first R in February. (Let's not even touch Wednesday.) And regardless of region, come and home don't rhyme, and neither do bomb and comb.

Whatever the intent of these latter-day reformers, their goal of widespread reform is unattainable.

That's partly due to regional variations in pronunciation. In New England, the word aunt phonetically would be spelled ont. Elsewhere in North America, its homonymous with ant. Similarly, roof can be pronounced with the double-O sound in whoops, or with the long U sound in rude.

Those are picayune examples, but they illustrate what I'm talking about. Relying on phonetics to produce proper spelling either would create multiple spellings that would complicate written communication, or it would require establishing a uniform pronunciation as well.

Logistics aside, the best reason not to alter the spelling of English words lies in the threat such reform would pose to our linguistic heritage. Changing our written language, even if only a fraction of the scope outlined by advocates of simpler spelling, would sunder us from Chaucer, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson and other giants of the English language, except "in translation." Given that words derive their meaning from their use in literature, with such a loss, we might as well not even bother having the language anymore.

Also lost would be the history embedded in the words themselves. Candidate has the Latin root candida, white, because those seeking public office in ancient Rome wore white to announce their candidacy. That golden nugget of history would be buried with a spelling like kandidaet; in the case of Wensdae, the day's etymological roots in North myth would be wholly obliterated.

The English language still has literary roots as far back as "Beowulf," an Anglo-Saxon poem written about 1,500 years ago; within its vocabulary -- and yes, within its spelling -- it carries nuggets of history pertaining to trade, politics, religion and a vast panoply of culture and literature. Remove the spelling, and you eradicate that record for all but the most scholarly.

The measure of reform that American English saw a hundred years ago wasn't due to the advocacy of men like Roosevelt and Andrew Carnegie, another advocate for simpler spelling. Rather, it was an organic process that grew out of the popular sentiments and attitudes of the American public. '

This is, after all, the same sort of unconscious force that produced the English language in all its richness and depth in the first place, by mingling Angles and Saxons. They in turn later fell to French Normans invaders in 1066. Over the years the speakers of the Middle English that grew out of that conquest have begged, borrowed and stolen phrases and words from all over the world, often adding new words and almost as often jettisoning an old word in favor of a new one.

The result? A thoroughly mongrelized modern English with roots everywhere.

And still it evolves. Feminine forms of many nouns are fading out of use, as the masculine forms become gender-inclusive. The Motion Picture Academy now refers to "male actors" and "female actors," and professional writers have stopped referring to women as comediennes. Similarly, even scientific writing increasingly doesn't use plurals like indices, appendices and formulae.

The spelling reform most likely to succeed already is underfoot by virtue of already being in use for effect. Words like tonite, nite, lite and brite -- all of which take advantage of the Silent E rule to replace the -ight -- have gained some limited acceptability, thanks to advertising and marketing gimmicks, along with other shortcuts like thruway.

I have to admit that my own sensibilities see the appeal to phasing out PH to make way for F (fotografy), replacing more C's with S's and K's (sirkle), and eliminating the soft G in favor of an old-fashioned J (jiraffe). And like playwright George Bernard Shaw, I can see the wisdom in eliminating apostrophes from contractions where its absence will not change the word's pronunciation.

But it's not going to happen that way.

If the goal is improved literacy, I'd suggest the would-be reformers find better means to that end than demonstrating at spelling bees and lobbying dictionary editors to list spellings like altho and hanus.

New spelling rules won't make half the difference that spending more time writing and reading will, particularly when done with children. That we do that less than ever is a far greater cruelty and a far worse tragedy than any of the spelling headaches written English has ever afflicted us with.



Copyright © 2006 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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penultimate

I was thinking about this word, and searching for a use other than its definition of “next to last,” when it occurred to me that the word has a great Arthurian flair. “Sign the contract,” quoth Sir Lancelot, “but use not the Pen Ultimate unless thou are worthy.”

scumbag, i never knew you

I just discovered that "scumbag" is a slang word for a used condom. I had no idea.

It makes sense, though, once you're aware of it. I mean, it never occurred to me, but it seems kind of obvious.

a shift in the tone

A friend of mine has pointed out that no one he knows from Pittsburgh understands how to ask questions. When we do ask something, the pitch of the last word, instead of being slightly elevated, comes out either flat or as part of a sing-son series of words, so that it sounds as though the Pittsburgher has left a sentence unfinished.

Illustrated with punctuation marks, this means the Pittsburgh native says things like, "Do you want to see the movie." Or "Haven't I seen you before."

Vince went on to make a remark about Pittsburghers' insistence on using the word "pop" to refer to soft drinks. (He also noted that Midwesterners usually pronounce it as "pawp.") At was at this point that Vince suddenly and unexpectedly was ejected from my vehicle.

As I later told him, any true Pittsburgher will defend to the death our use of the word "pop" since that is the correct common noun to use in reference to soft drinks.

words, words, words

I have a confession to make: I love words.

I don't know if I love words because I'm a professional writer, or if I'm a professional writer because I love words, but I love them all the same.

Mind, I'm not talking about words such as "concupiscence" or "erudition." Those words are fine and I'll use them from time to time — well, except for concupiscence — but by and large people use such words more to show off than to communicate.

I love the little bits of history you find in words — such as "candidate" having a Latin root meaning "white" because Roman candidates for office were required to wear white togas — and I love the way some words just belong with their definitions because their sounds match perfectly.

As a journalist, I'm supposed to keep my wordsmithing fairly straightforward, but I can't help it. As soon as I can find a way to use the following words in the newspaper without risking a lawsuit, I'm going to use them:

Skulduggery. A word used for behavior considered underhanded or unscrupulous — now there's another fun word — "skulduggery" is one of my all-time favorites.

If the meaning alone isn't enough to convince you to add "skulduggery" to your vocabulary, consider how it rolls off your tongue. Skulduggery the sound and skulduggery the word go together like a duck and water.

Whenever I hear "skulduggery," I picture a grave robber unearthing someone's bones. The image is of someone who is absolutely at home with corruption — a perfect match between sound and meaning.

How can you not love a word with that sort of synergy?

Flibbertigibbet. I probably never would have learned this word if my wife hadn't made me watch Rodgers and Hammerstein' s "The Sound of Music" with her last year. It remains one of the few things I gained from the movie, which otherwise sucked nearly three hours out of my life.

"Flibbertigibbet" first arrived in English during the 15th century, some time after Geoffrey Chaucer wrote "The Canterbury Tales" but more than 100 years before William Shakespeare ever wrote his plays.

The word refers to a silly person, a linkage boosted by the rapidity of its syllables, its repetition of the I and B sounds, and the lack of any hard consonants. It's soft, it's simple and it evokes images of a featherbrain who doesn't know when to stop singing. Another perfect match.

Gerrymandering. Even though I've known this word since my social studies class in ninth grade, I've never had the chance to use it — not even last year, when New Jersey Republicans and Democrats were squabbling over how to carve the state's legislative districts.

Based on the name and practices of Elbridge Gerry, a former governor of Massachusetts, "gerrymandering" is the act of establishing election districts that favor one political party at the expense of another, often by carving the districts into truly bizarre shapes. The "mander" part of the word comes from "salamander."

True, Gerry probably wanted to be remembered for other accomplishments during his governorship, but he still attained lasting fame of a sort. It's not everyone who has a legacy carved into the substance of a language like that.

Formicate. Part of the appeal of this word admittedly is that it sounds a little naughty, but the truth is that it's about as far from that other word as you can get.

Unlike "fornicate," which comes from the Latin word for a brothel, the root word of "formicate" is "formica," or "ant." "Formication" therefore is the sensation of ants walking across your skin, and has nothing to do with whether you're married.

If you formicate regularly, you probably are suffering severe hallucinations and will need extensive help getting rid of your delusory insects.

Embrangle. Even if you've never heard this word before — it dates back to 1664, and doesn't get much use right now — its definition should be easy to grasp. Try saying it, and you'll sense its meaning just by what it does to your tongue.

I first saw "embrangled" several years ago in an article in Time magazine. It refers to getting caught in a situation outside your control, or being embroiled in difficulty or conflict.

Omphaloskepsis. A nice, long word that means "the contemplation of one's navel." It's also a good description of what goes into writing about words you find interesting.

On javelines and javelinas

It's curious, but there is no philological connection between javelin and javelina, despite the spellings.

A javelina of course is a wild pig from the American Southwest, with sharp teeth like javelines. With anatomy like that, one could be forgiven for thinking that the pig takes its name from the deadly weapon, on account of its own javelines. Alas, it is not to be.

Javelin comes from the Celtic javelot, or the Old Irish gabul, which means "forked stick." Javelina comes from the Spanish jabalina, or "wild pig." There's probably a word for this sort of linguistic passing of two ships in the night, but I don't know what it is.

I suppose it makes sense, though. Who's going to want to throw a wild pig for a sporting event?