I left the house a little after eight o’clock this morning in the character of a groom out of work. There is a wonderful sympathy and freemasonry among horsey men. Be one of them, and you will know all that there is to know. (“A Scandal in Bohemia”)

One of the many things I love about reading on my Kindle is that I can point to a word on the screen and immediately see how the New Oxford American Dictionary defines the term. (This turns out to be the same dictionary that comes bundled with Mac OS X, so I get the same definitions on both platforms.)

“Instinctive sympathy or fellow feeling between people with something in common.” I had no idea that “freemasonry” had this secondary meaning. I love it. I’ll try to slip it into casual conversation at some point.

Une méduse, in French, is a many-tentacled jellyfish. But I’m quite confident that Benjamin didn’t mean une méduse but rather la Méduse — Medusa herself:

My favorite grammar books, therefore, don’t have the word grammar in their titles:

1. The Chicago Manual of Style
2. The American Heritage Book of English Usage

Despite their apologetic tone, these are both solid references for anyone looking to standardize written grammar.

Chicago is available online (for a subscription). American Heritage was online at Bartleby.com, but some time in the past year, it disappeared down the memory hole. This has been a problem for me professionally, as I need an online reference to cite for editorial corrections I make at work. Otherwise, resistant writers or underinformed proofreaders are likely to incorrect my corrections.

The section of American Heritage I have needed to cite most often is the subjunctive, which is usually a counterfactual construction, but is too often confused for a conditional. In a self-conscious effort to get it right, most writers seem to get this one wrong. So you think it would be easy to point them to an authority on getting it right, an explanation not just of how and when to use the subjective mood but also when not to use it.

The only reliable such explanation I’ve found is American Heritage, and it’s no longer conveniently available online.

So I’ve transcribed it here.

“Hannah gave birth to a son whom she named Samuel, saying,
‘Because I asked Yahweh for him.’”

The canceled TV show Kings (which I discovered this week on Hulu.com) has me revisiting the books of Samuel, especially because, while most names map directly (e.g., the shepherd David to David Shepherd, Jonathan of the tribe of Benjamin to Jack Benjamin, Michal to Michelle, the prophet Samuel to Reverend Samuels), King Saul’s TV equivalent is named Silas.

Well, apparently Silas is a Greek form of Saul by way of Aramaic. Clever TV writers.

But Hannah’s explanation of the name Samuel — “Because I asked Yahweh for him” — confused me. So here’s the fascinating tidbit I learn from Wikipedia:

According to 1 Samuel 1:20, Hannah was the mother of Samuel and named him in memory of her requesting a child from God and God listening. Samuel is translated as Heard of God or possibly as a sentence “God has heard” (from ‘Shama’, heard and ‘El’, God — with “Shama” as the verb and “El” as the subject).

However, some textual scholars think that the passage originally referred to King Saul, whose name means “asked” and was later changed by an anti-monarchial editor, so that Saul would no longer appear to have a divinely appointed birth.

I had read this passage of Mises before (from Human Action, chapter 15: “The Market”), but had somehow failed to notice the irony of an Austrian Jew using this particular term in this particular way:

It is quite common nowadays to deprecate the capitalists and entrepreneurs. A man is prone to sneer at those who are more prosperous than himself. These people, he contends, are richer only because they are less scrupulous than he. If he were not restrained by due consideration for the laws of morality and decency, he would be no less successful than they are. Thus men glory in the aureole of self-complacency and Pharisaic self-righteousness.

(AP) Cool and collected, Kavya Shivashankar wrote out every word on her palm and always ended with a smile. The 13-year-old Kansas girl saved the biggest smile for last, when she rattled off the letters to “Laodicean” to become the nation’s spelling champion.

From Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, p. 1202:

Laodicea

The church at Laodicea is bitterly condemned, not for being outspokenly opposed to the doctrines favored by John, but for being neutral. John apparently prefers an honest enemy to a doubtful friend:

Revelation 3:15. I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.

Revelation 3:16. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.

"Laodicean" has therefore entered the English language as a word meaning "indifferent" or "neutral."

Bart D. Ehrman, Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend:

One thing that can be said about Pharisees is that the most common stereotype about them is almost certainly wrong. In the dictionary, today, if you look up the word Pharisee you’ll find as one of the later definitions “hypocrite.” This has always struck me as bizarre — somewhat like defining Episcopalian as “drunkard” or Baptist as “adulterer.” To be sure, there are no doubt Episcopalian alcoholics and Baptist philanderers, just as there must have been Pharisaic hypocrites. But as I tell my students, agreeing to commit hypocrisy was not an entrance requirement for the Pharisaic party. There was no hypocritic oath.

One thing we do know about the Pharisees is that they strove to follow God’s law as rigorously as they could. This doesn’t make them hypocrites; it makes them religious. (p. 106)

It seems the cultural equation Pharisee = hypocrite must come from Matthew 23, where Matthew’s Jesus juxtaposes the terms 7 times within 17 lines (13, 14,15, 23, 25, 27, 29). Outside Matthew, the words appear together only once (Luke 11:44), again on Jesus’s lips.

Matthew’s is the most insistently Jewish of the gospels, not just Jewish, but rabbinic Jewish, i.e., Pharisaic. It is also, some have argued, the most anti-Jewish (though I think there are passages in John that might outstrip Matthew for vitriol).

When I was in college, the most venomous attacks I’d hear against black men came from the mouths of black women. If I quoted them to you out of context, you’d take it as racist “hate speech.” The context makes all the difference. I think Christianity becoming a gentile religion ended up taking a lot of this ancient Jewish infighting very much out of context.

05.16.09 | The Origins of OK

Posted in Editorial Musings at 7:07 pm by Administrator

How many times a day do you say or write “OK”? Quite a few, right? Now, have you ever wondered where “OK” came from? Perhaps not, but since one of my main jobs is to tell you things you never knew you wanted to know, I am about to tell you some of the history of “OK.”

For the record, I am summarizing from The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories. If you want the complete story, please refer to that fine, fun volume.

You may already know that “OK” is thought to be an abbreviation for “all correct.” That’s great, but then shouldn’t the abbreviation be “AC”? Just imagine thousands of sixteen-year-olds saying, “Mom, I’m borrowing the car tonight, AC?” Sounds weird, right? Either “OK” was created by a bad speller or there is more to the story. Turns out there is more to the story.

Apparently there was an “abbreviation fad” in American cities in the 1830s (when “OK” appeared, and way before text messaging!). Abbreviating phrases was the hip thing to do. “One kind kiss before we part” became “O.K.K.B.W.P.,” which sounds so nineteenth century compared to “LOL” or “BFF.” It was also fashionable to deliberately misspell words and then abbreviate them. “All right” became “oll wright” and was abbreviated “O.W.” Got it? (Webster does not mention whether this misspelling-and-abbreviating fad was actually a conspiracy among young people to confuse old people. I see room for further research here.)

You are undoubtedly way ahead of me by now and have already figured out that “all correct” was transformed into “oll korrect,” which was abbreviated “OK.” OK?

There is another theory, which says that “OK” is from the Choktaw word “okeh.” Woodrow Wilson used the “okeh” spelling, considering “OK” to be just plain wrong. Some people just like to be different.

Which story is korrect? I prefer the misspelling/abbreviating conspiracy theory. Let’s never take our language so seriously that we forbid ourselves from playing with it. OK? Oll wright!

I’ve dealt with this problem on the blog, here and here. But now we can finally point to something much more comprehensive, thorough, and enjoyable to read: Jeff Riggenbach’s American History Is Not What They Say: An Introduction to Revisionism. Let’s spread the word and try to get this one read and well known.

Today’s Mises Daily is Riggenbach’s introduction, and LRC ran chapter 1 as their headliner.

(It’s in Matthew 11:18–19, too, but I somehow missed it.)

Luke 7:

33. For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He hath a devil.
34. The Son of man is come eating and drinking; and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners!

Does that remind anyone else of Professor Long’s guide to arguing with libertarians?