Wednesday July 22, 2009
Time to grow up
By Jim Taylor
You may have learned some of these absolutely infallible rules about English during your school years:
- Never split an infinitive
- Never end a sentence with a preposition
- Never start a sentence with “and” or “but”
- Never start a sentence with “I”
- Never use words like “ain’t”
Well, lemme tell you, it just ain’t so.
Not one of those rules is infallible. Some of them never were. Others have simply faded into irrelevance as language changes.
Yet my fellow editors constantly run across writers who insist that things must be said a certain way, because that’s what they were taught when they were children – as it was in the beginning, it is now, and ever shall be, amen!
James Harbeck is both an editor and a linguist with, I believe, three degrees. He commented recently, “Siiiiiiigh! Why is it that people will cling fast to the authority of their grade-school English teacher when they would readily confess that their biology, chemistry, or physics teachers could not trump the knowledge of current physicians, pharmacists, or engineers? Oh, please, let me never drive across a bridge built by someone with the same attitude towards engineering expertise…”
Childhood understandings
I’ve found that James Harbeck is usually right. But it’s not just about language that people cling to outdated “rules.”
In religion, too, people lock onto concepts in childhood. They hold fast to the truth of what they learned in Sunday school or catechism classes, and reject any scholarly insights that might conflict with those early impressions:
- Jesus died for our sins
- The Bible is God’s holy word
- God lives in heaven
- God judges everything we do
- Bad people go to hell
As it happens, I was one of those Sunday school teachers. I taught some of those lessons – more or less. I was 18 years old at the time. I knew nothing about biblical scholarship, theology, cultural anthropology, myth and symbol…
By the time I quit teaching Sunday school, more than 20 years later, I had learned a lot. Since then, I’ve learned a lot more. And I am appalled that some of my early students might still cite my ignorance as absolute truth, valid for all time.
Through a glass, dimly
A while ago, a correspondent gently reprimanded me for my views. But with prayer and Bible study, she suggested, I might yet see the light.
To support her argument, she quoted one of the apostle Paul’s best known verses: “When I was a child, I thought like a child… Now we see through a glass, dimly, but then we shall see clearly…Now I know in part; then I will know fully…”
I agree totally, but perhaps not in the way she intended. Whether it’s language, religion, or any other subject, we need to set aside childhood understandings and partial comprehension; we must struggle constantly towards fuller knowledge.
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn
I heard from a couple of people about last week’s column, who didn’t particularly want their stories published. Mostly, the references to family court revived painful memories – typically, of children and grandchildren so poisoned by the process of separation/divorce that there has been no contact with the parent or grandparent for 20 years.
One correspondent saw some signs of reconciliation with grandchildren, at least. The other saw no improvement at all.
Bill Peterson responded to my correspondence about driving habits: “As a hybrid driver, I am trying to add my style of driving to the efficiencies of the car to improve the net result.
“I live in a small community where traffic is not heavy except at shift-change at the local packing house. In town, I try to drive the 25 mph speed limit on city streets as that is the speed at which my cruise control starts working and thus is a better speed controller than I am.
“On the highway connecting my town and a nearby (6 miles) city and the Interstate, I usually set my cruise at 55 mph. (That too is one of the most efficient settings for economy.) That is usually only 5 mph (intra-city) and no more than 10-15 mph below the Interstate limit. That is not a traffic ‘blocker’ in Nebraska, Iowa or Missouri. However, when I go through Kansas City and within St Louis, I force myself to ‘go with the flow.’
“I am continually amazed at the number of drivers who seem to be compelled to treat the speed limit as a minimum…”
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About My Paraphrases
Occasionally, I get frustrated by the Bible. Not usually by the message, which is timeless, but by the language and metaphor. Contemporary translations update the language, but not the metaphor, so the text still expects us to respond to images of deserts and tents, camels and droughts, kings and concubines. What we’ve learned since the Bible was written — about psychology and evolution, about quantum physics and astronomy, computers and fossil fuels – is simply left out.
At such times, I start paraphrasing. I don’t pretend that these paraphrases rely on new translations of original texts. They are, rather, my way of writing what I think the original writers might have said IF they lived today. Sometimes I stick close to the traditional versification; sometimes I take liberties.
My paraphrase of Paul’s letter to the Romans attempts to put Paul’s sometimes convoluted words — and argument — into a contemporary setting. If Paul were writing today, to the Christian church, I’m not sure he’d worry as much about the failure of the Jews to follow Christ as about the failure of Christians to follow Christ, so I have rephrased in those terms. I suspect he would also make use of quotations from the Gospels — which of course didn’t exist when he wrote his letters — rather than using quotations from the only scriptures he had available, which we call the Old Testament.
About 200 people have requested the paraphrase of Romans, as an electronic file.
I now have two new paraphrases available, for Ecclesiastes and Job. Ecclesiastes sticks pretty much to the biblical flow of verses – though with, I hope, some sense of humour. Job cuts 42 chapters down to about three pages. I found the speeches in Job interminable; the only way I could make sense of the various characters’ verbal meanderings was to turn them into television sound-bites.
I’m making these available the same way as Romans – on the honor system. You send me an e-mail and request the file you want. I’ll send it. If you like it, and want to keep it, you send me a cheque for $5 by snail mail. If you don’t like it, simply erase it from your hard disk and send nothing.
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
If you know someone else who might like to receive this column regularly via e-mail, send a request to jimt@quixotic.ca. Or, if you wish, forward them a copy of this column. But please put your name on it, so they don’t think I’m sending out spam.
For a lighter look at life, faith, and the lectionary, I recommend my friend Ralph Milton’s weekly e-newsletter Rumors. You can subscribe to it by sending a note to ralphmilton@woodlake.com.
For other web links worth pursuing, try
- Charlene Fairchild’s United Online site,
- David Keating’s “SeemslikeGod” page
- The Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity home page
- Dan Strizek’s Gathering Place for Creation Spirituality
- Alva Wood’s satiric stories about small town attitudes and bumbling bureaucrats are not particularly religious, but good fun anyway; write alvawood@gmail.com to get onto her mailing list.
- Jim Henderschedt’s occasional e-zine, Fresh Water, subscribe by writing him, jimbet1219@verizon.net
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