And now for some hilarity . . .

Sorry. I can't help it.

I mentioned a few weeks ago Michael Quinion's World Wide Words. I am still fascinated by his discussions of words' provenances. But for me, the highlight of the newsletter is "Sic!" in which he and his readers point out strange and humorous headlines or turns of phrase in news stories. A collection from the last month's worth of newsletters.

Particularly humorous after yesterday's event in our family: "Miranda Kerr returns to the Victoria's Secret catwalk after giving birth in a $2.5 million diamond studded bra." ("Gosh, that's a bit dressy for giving birth!" wrote the woman who noticed the headline.)

"Headline of the week!" announced Howard Sinberg, in reference to one over a story dated 9 November on the website of WDSU in New Orleans: "Unmarried Couples Find Divorce Difficult."

"I'd like to see them take it away!" Colin Hall remarked, having read the What's News section of the Wall Street Journal dated 2 November: "The president-elect of Kyrgyzstan said the U.S. should leave its air base there when the lease expires in 2014."

I didn't know the University of Colorado was that old," commented Jeff Brandt about a story of 14 November from the Alaska Dispatch: "The buckle ... was found inside an excavation of a 1,000-year-old Inupiat house that had been dug into a beach ridge at Cape Espenberg by a team from the University of Colorado at Boulder."

On 21 November, a story in the New York Times (noted by Jim Conroy) stated that "Cities like Fort Lauderdale, Tampa and San Juan, P.R., have started to fly to Havana in recent months."

John Eliot Spofford reports that the online Newswire edition of Trains magazine for 28 November had this headline for an article about the Metro-North commuter train service for New York City: "Metro-North unveils plan to improve winter interruptions."

A report on ABC News on 30 November about a lawsuit contained a typo (since corrected): "It was filed in the Philadelphia Court of Common Please." Robert Wake wondered if there might be a counterbalancing Court of Thank You.

And then, finally, this wonderful ironical paragraph of advice about how to speak (or write) effectively. Quoted from Notes and Queries, 11 February 1893:

Let your conversation possess a clarified conciseness, compacted comprehensibleness, coalescent consistency, and a concatenated cogency. Eschew all conglomerations of flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement, and asinine affectations. Let your extemporaneous descantings and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibility, without rhodomontade or thrasonical bombast. Sedulously avoid all polysyllabical profundity, pompous prolixity, and ventriloquial vapidity. Shun double-entendre and prurient jocosity, whether obscure or apparent. In other words, speak truthfully, naturally, clearly, purely, but do not use large words.

Uh. Yeah.

Word fun

I just subscribed to a free fun newsletter that comes out once a week. It deals with words. (You can check it out at http://www.worldwidewords.org.)

This week's letter included the following stories I thought you would enjoy:

Topical Words: Plan B
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The news in Britain in recent weeks has been full of references to the notorious Plan A of the Chancellor, George Osborne. He said last year that his scheme for improving the country's finances was the only one needed. Last December, the Treasury insisted that "There is no Plan B", which shows signs of becoming a sarcastic catchphrase. A hundred economists published an open letter in the Observer last Sunday in an attempt to change Osborne's mind, arguing that "It is now clear that plan A isn't working" and urging the government to adopt a plan B. This has been reinforced this week by similar calls from the Liberal Democrats, coalition partners in the government. Ed Balls, Osborne's Labour opposition counterpart, dismisses all such alphabetical labels: "Call it Plan A-plus. Call it Plan B. Call it Plan C. I don't care what they call it - Britain just needs a plan that works."

Observers of a logical bent might wonder, if Mr Osborne only ever expects to have a Plan A, why he bothered to assign a letter to it.
A British author had fun with this approach half a century ago:

"This is what I call 'pattern A'."
"And what is pattern B?" asked Ann Halsey.
"There won't be any pattern B."
"Then why bother with the A?"
"Preserve me from the obtuseness of women! I can call it
pattern A because I want to, can't I?"
"Of course, dear. But why do you want to?"
[The Black Cloud, by Fred Hoyle, 1959.]

To label alternatives with letters is now so fashionable as hardly to warrant much comment, even though to develop possibilities much beyond Plan C is either to suggest an over-controlling and anxious personality or strategies that contemplate extraordinary contingencies. Plan Z gets some attention, but usually as one so far down the list it can only be crackpottery. Even Plan B is more often a humorous comment on a Plan A that has proved impracticable ("we need a plan B", "time for plan B") than a serious potential alternative.

Legal documents have identified plans and drawings by letters for at least a couple of centuries. The origin of the figurative expression partly lies here, but more specifically in plans that illustrate alternative proposals for a development ("The scheme shown in Plan A for remodelling the house is more expensive than the alternative outlined in Plan B").

The Oxford English Dictionary has entries for both Plan A and Plan B which imply that they originate in the US. However, its earliest citation for Plan B - a letter sent during the Civil War in 1863 - turns out to refer to a physical plan or drawing. I have found a British example, from the Report of the proceedings of the Church Congress held in Cambridge in November 1861, where it refers to one of two proposals for a scheme to modify church taxes. The first known example of Plan A is currently from an equally improbable source - the 1867 Report of the US Commissioners to the Paris Universal Exposition of that year.

And

Sic!
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The San Francisco Chronicle reported on a court case in its issue of
31 October, Jitze Couperus tells us: "A Florida widow who died in
the 2001 anthrax mailings has reached a tentative settlement in her
lawsuit against the U.S. government according to court filings."

Numeracy rules. Fred A Roth reports that a headline on Fox News on
27 October read "FOX NEWS POLL: More than three thirds of Americans
are dissatisfied with the way the U.S. is heading." It has since
been changed. So has the one Roy Zukerman spotted on the website of
the Los Angeles Times the same day: in an article about measuring
the size of the planetoid Eris when it passed in front of a star, it
stated that "Just three telescopes, both in Chile, managed to catch
the event."

Seen by Ian Harrison on an advertising sign placed by a well-known
local supermarket in Johannesburg: "Whole chicken pieces." How would
one tell?

"The ads down the side of Gmail," wrote Sarah Borowski, "are quite
often a source of amusement, such as this one, obviously aimed at
Jake the Peg: 'Get 3 For The Price Of 2 When You Shop Online With
Hotter Shoes!'"

That last one seemed to make sense, although I couldn't figure out what the reference to “Jake the Peg” might be.

But then I think I “got it.” One doesn't buy individual shoes. What will you do with three shoes for the price of two? . . . But a guy named Jake who has a peg leg might like the offer. . . .

Finally, I did a search online and it turns out there’s a song called “Jake the Peg” about a guy who was born with an extra leg:

The day that I was born, oh boy, my father nearly died.
He couldn't get my nappies on, no matter how he tried,
'Cause I was born with an extra leg, and since that day begun,
I had to learn to stand on my own three feet,
Believe me that's no fun. . . .

I had a dreadful childhood, really,
I s'pose I shouldn't moan,
Each time they had a three legged race,
I won it on my own.
And also I got popular,
When came the time for cricket,
They used to roll my trousers up,
And use me for the wicket. . . .

I was a dreadful scholar,
I found all the lessons hard,
The only thing I knew for sure was three feet make a yard.
To count to ten I used my fingers,
If I needed more,
By getting my shoes and socks off,
I could count to twenty-four.
(Pause...count: 1 2 3 4 5....) To twenty-five! . . .

Whatever I did they said was false,
They said 'Quick march,' I did a quick waltz.
Then they shouted at me 'Put your best foot forward.'
'But which foot?' I said.
'It's very fine for you, you only got a choice of two, but me!

And then I found a hilarious presentation of the song on YouTube . . . presented by Rolf Harris who adapted it from a Dutch song about "Ben van der Steen" (Ben of the Stone).

Fascinating word play video

Sorry. This video includes a few ideas that are worthy of a PG-13 rating (two that show from 0:58-1:04 and two more from about 2:08-2:16). But the overall creativity, I think, is worth the price of admission.

The concept: How can you illustrate a word using the letters that spell the word in English?

A few words require some pretty fancy manipulation. But most of them don't. Honestly, I don't understand why the author/artist flipped the one letter in "Van Gogh," for example. But see what you think:



My favorites include some of the early ones: Elevator and Horizon, for example. What are yours?

Pesky pronouns!

I wondered when I would finally get around to writing blog posts again!

I "couldn't take it" anymore. Today is the day.

I woke up and my Scripture reading included Psalm 65 and Psalm 66. I'm reading in the ESV (English Standard Version). I thought Psalm 65:2 was a bit odd:

O you who hears prayer,
    to you shall all flesh come.

I thought: "'. . . [Y]ou who hears prayer'? . . . That's not right! You'd say, 'You . . . hear prayer,' not, 'You . . . hears prayer.' --It's the same way you distinguish when to say 'Bill and I' from when to say 'Bill and me': Knock out the additional noun so you can tell whether you should use the first-person subjective or first person objective pronoun:

• Bill and I went to camp. (?) -OR- Bill and me went to camp. (?)
  Bill and I went to camp. (?) -OR- Bill and me Me went to camp. (?)
  --Ah! It's very clear: I should say Bill and I went to camp; I should never say, Bill and me went to camp.
   
• Lucy targeted Bill and I. (?) -OR- Lucy targeted Bill and me. (?)
  Lucy targeted Bill and I. (?) -OR- Lucy targeted Bill and me. (?)
      --Again it's very clear: I should say Lucy targeted Bill and me; I should never say, Lucy targeted Bill and I.

And so it is here in Psalm 65:2:

• O you who hears prayer . . . (?) -OR- O you who hear prayer. (?)
  You who hears prayer . . . (?) -OR- You who hear prayer. (?)
  --No question: I should say, O you who hear prayer; I should never say, O you who hears prayer.

So where did that grammatical error come from?

I checked some other versions on BlueLetterBible.org. --All the older versions in which God is always addressed with the old-style "thou" and "thee"--and, concomitantly, the versions that maintain the "-eth" and "-est" suffixes on verbs--render Psalm 65:2 as "thou that hearest" or "thou who hearest." All the modern translations--except the ESV--render it as "you who hear."

. . . I think I'm going to write to the publisher!

-------
--And then, Psalm 66:1 and 4:

Shout for joy to God, all the earth . . .
All the earth worships you
    and sings praises to you;
    they sing praises to your name.

Ever since working my way through Genesis 1-11 back in January, I have been more attentive than normal to the use in the Bible of any English words that are closely associated with "the earth"--words like the earth, earth, soil, land, etc. --What Hebrew word is it that the translators are rendering into these English terms?

Is it eretz (Genesis 12:1, for example, where it appears twice but is translated in the ESV as country the first time and land the second; or Genesis 13:15-16, where it appears three times: once as land and the second and third times as earth)? Adamah (Genesis 1:25 includes both eretz ["And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds"] and adamah [". . . and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind"])?

Turns out, in Psalm 66, the earth, in both cases, is ha eretz.

--Not sure what that means, ultimately. But I find it interesting that ha eretz, a singular noun, is replaced by a plural pronoun in the third line of v. 4: "they sing praises to your name."

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And one final verbal oddity.

This one comes from our sermon yesterday morning.

Our pastor preached from Genesis 27, where Jacob puts on goatskin so he can deceive his blind father and acquire the blessing his father intended for Jacob's older brother, Esau.

In Genesis 27:5-8 we read,

Now Rebekah [the mother of both Jacob and Esau--JAH] was listening when Isaac spoke to his son Esau. So when Esau went to the field to hunt for game and bring it, Rebekah said to her son Jacob, "I heard your father speak to your brother Esau, 'Bring me game and prepare for me delicious food, that I may eat it and bless you before [YHWH] before I die.' Now therefore, my son . . ."

Did you catch the interesting possessive pronouns?

Now Rebekah was listening when Isaac spoke to his son Esau. So when Esau went to the field . . ., Rebekah said to her son Jacob . . ."

Kind of reminds me of the many places throughout the Old Testament where the authors carefully distinguish the possessive pronouns attached to God: One person will refer to "YHWH our God" or "YHWH my God," the next to "YHWH your God." Or the same person will refer, at one point in his life, to "YHWH your God," but at another point he will speak of "YHWH my God."

--VERY interesting!

(By the way. It's pretty clear why the Scriptures speak of Jacob as Rebekah's son while Esau is Isaac's son. Look at Genesis 25:28: "Isaac loved Esau because he ate of his game, but Rebekah loved Jacob." --Anyone want to deal with a dysfunctional family?)

Save the Words!

I'm not sure this is really worth the effort, but Oxford University Press and the Oxford Dictionary/Oxford FAJAR have created a new "humanitarian" effort to



They explain their motivation:

Each year hundreds of words are dropped from the English language.

Old words, wise words, hard-working words. Words that once led meaningful lives but now lie abandoned and forgotten.

You can do your part. Help save the words!

If not for yourself, then for generations yet to come.

Now, you may ask, "What have future generations done for us lately?"

Well, not much.

But one day they'll be grateful. You never know, they may even have a word or two to say about you.

Help spread the word.

spread the word

If you love words as much as we do, find room for them again in conversation and written communication. Each time you use an abandoned word you'll increase its chances of survival.

Here are a few suggestions on how to get your adopted word back into society. . . .

--And then they expand on the concept of how to save the words by means of strategic use of meetings, name changes, pet names, Scrabble, graffiti, signboards, sky writing, SMS/text-messaging, tattoos, and more to revive otherwise moribund words.

Maybe.

Check it out!

If you turn up your sound, you will hear the words cry out to you in plaintive voices: "Pick me!" "No, no! Me!" "Over here!" "Choose me!" . . . Oh! It could make you cry. (Not.)

But it is very cute.