Ditch Doc

The Mennonites of Aylmer, Ontario.
Because who else is spinning Elgin County the Christian mariachi top 40 in Low German?

English translations of Vatican documents are notoriously loose, and the critical reviewer can sometimes sniff out what looks like a deliberate distortion. The Holy Father’s letter to the Bishops explaining his Motu Proprio of July 7, 2007 offers a tidy example. The English translation twice refers to the Mass of Bl. John XXIII as the ‘former usage’. In the same places, the French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese use ‘ancien’, ‘antiguo’, ‘antico’ and ‘antigo’. I know too little German to be certain, but I think that translation uses ‘alten’. All these words describe existence in a previous time, while allowing for continuation into the present. ‘Former’, on the other hand, is reserved for things that are no longer. For illustration, imagine applying first the word ‘ancient’ and then the word ‘former’ to the faith. Does one of these not quite match up? Not much further commentary is necessary on this point, except to provide a popular North American English idiom which sums up my reply to the nameless translator:
“In your dreams.”
God bless the Pope.

Senior Medical Resident: (Frowning, feeling elderly demented patient’s chest for abnormal heart findings): “Hmm… yes, she does have a thrill.”

Patient, scoffing: “Well, I’ve had more than that!”

Overheard on the local rap station the other day:

“They say I should be a doctor,
But I don’t have the patientce.”

In a feat of ipsiflagellant Narcissism that shouldn’t be possible in only four words, the seemingly innocent phrase “free gift with purchase” manages both to restate itself unnecessarily and to contradict itself. Which makes it a redundant oxymoron. The species remains on the endangered list, but shows signs of vitality that give preservationists reason to hope for an eventual recovery.

The Synergese language, an English-Robotic pidgin favoured by the corporate underclasses of North-America, is notable for its peculiar treatment of first person pronouns. When the first person is juxtaposed with the third in either subject or predicate, the ‘me’ or ‘I’ form is replaced with the idiosyncratic ‘myself.’ For example:

“Copy the TPS report to me.”
“Copy the TPS report to Linda and myself.”

“I prioritized these actionables.”
“Either John or myself will action these priorities.”

This useful convention eliminates the need to distinguish subject from predicate, an insurmountably difficult operation for many Synergese. (See also ‘He, She and They: Gender neutrality in Synergese third person singular pronouns.’)

Yesterday, I met a doctor named Langlois, which he pronounced ‘Lang-wah’. That would be an English pronunciation of the French word for an Englishman. I wonder what he calls himself in French.

Theocracy is the wrong word. We call Australia a democracy because we think the people rule, we used to call Iraq a cleptocracy because we thought a thief ruled, and sometimes we take a sardonic poke at Canada and call it a bureaucracy when it seems like the desks rule. But who ever thought God ruled Taliban-era Afghanistan? Not Christians. Not atheists. And here’s the kicker: not the Taliban. Theocracy means God is the head of state, and gives day to day instruction on everything from criminal justice to strategy in war.* Unless I’m mistaken, not even the Taliban claimed to be acting out God’s contemporaneous commands. So why use a word that no one thinks is accurate? I don’t want to see Richard Dawkins behind every tree, but I think I catch a whiff of the same sarcasm perfuming phrases like “God fighting on both sides.” ‘Well, yes, they treat their women like cattle, and yes, the penalty for apostasy is death, but what do you expect? They let God run things.’ If we’re to have a fruitful discussion of the relationship between religion and politics, let’s restrict the word to the only nation it truly describes: the people of Isreal in the period from Moses to Saul. And find a new word for the Taliban.

*Countries ruled by God’s deputies based on earlier divine commandments don’t count. That’s why we don’t call Vatican City a theocracy.

Any blog with philological pretensions has to put in an indignant note on this story. It appears that the Oxford University Press, of all presses, no longer includes words related to Christianity, Empire or the countryside in its Junior Dictionary. Of course there’s only limited room in a children’s dictionary, and something had to go to make room for ‘blog’ and ‘EU’. The modern British tyke no longer has time to pursue the ‘ferret’, the ‘goblin’, the ‘boar’ or the ‘cheetah’ through the ‘brambles’ and ‘buttercups’ beneath the ‘chestnut’, but at least now he knows that the former are ‘endangered’, and the latter may dry up any day now in a ‘drought’. Chesterton would have a FIT.

I realized a few months ago, during a rather unproductive debate about homosexuality, what the average university student means by “strong opinion”. It’s an opinion that you actually think is true, at the expense of other opinions contradicting it. Regular-strength opinions are those to which you have some attachment, but for which you don’t have or want a rational account. Since they make no claims about real truth and falsehood, they’re impervious to any arguments supporting the truth of an opposing strong opinion. Ironically, that means you can cling to a regular opinion much more strongly than to a strong one. The marketing is flawless: “Opinion 2.0. Start generating low maintenance, energy efficient personal views TODAY! Just as easy to act on as the original, but requiring only 10% the time and effort! Opinion 2.0 – Outsource your intellect.”