Category Archives: the language

How Not to Use the Vernacular

books, church, quotes, the language, , ,

In those long-ago days when new cars had built-in cassette players and we were a large homeschooling family, I invested in a set of tapes of the New Testament, narrated by Alexander Scourby. Those were the only straight readings of the Bible I heard until last week, when I popped The Message into my CD player.

Eugene Petersen is a man whom I admire and respect. The first I ever heard his name was as the author of a book with a compelling title, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. To hear him speak, as I have recently on the Mars Hill Audio publications, is to know that he has received a goodly share of grace and wisdom from God. In introductions to the recordings he explains that his motives for writing The Message paraphrase of the Bible were to make it accessible to the everyday English speaker as a “reading Bible,” to introduce them to God’s words and God’s ways, with prayers that they would go on to read a study Bible, and learn to participate in the life of God.

A couple of years ago I read a few passages in the printed version of his translation, as he loosely calls it, and was neither impressed nor offended. But I’m past the stage of needing an introduction, so I didn’t pay much attention. I bought the recording because it was the least expensive experiment I could make in a newer format, and I didn’t imagine that the experience would be so far removed from listening to Alexander Scourby.

It was only a year ago that Scourby read the entire gospel of Matthew to me while I was driving to the mountains and back in my old car. It was a flood of God’s blessing to hear that much of the earthly life of my Lord — His words, His being the Word — in one sitting, and I thought my heart would burst with the overflow. The several hours’ drive was over before I knew it.

But the narrator of The Message series makes me remember why we always chant or sing the Scripture in the Orthodox Church. The first portion I listened to was Matthew’s gospel, in which John the Baptist and Jesus appear early on, and the narrator gives them the voice and intonation of an actor over-dramatizing his role. In tone, it is so not the vernacular, unless you are a football coach at half-time when your team is losing, or a political talk-show host on a rant. To have the words of Christ spoken that way is to make Him out to be a cheerleader or an ad-man. Even the most Pentecostal preachers I have heard do not speak with such urgency through their whole sermon.

If only Eugene Peterson had been the one to read aloud his rendition of the Bible. He would not have been capable of such a style, nor would he have thought it necessary. He knows that the words of God do not need hepping up. Let your yea be yea and your nay, nay. But he speaks more slowly even than Scourby, whose pace sacrifices speed to dignity.

I had to dig out our old cassettes to check who the narrator was, and then I googled his name. Wikipedia says, “Although Scourby made voice recordings of over 500 different books, he considered the Bible to be his most important,” saying “‘…it is the one book that has the power to inspire, encourage, comfort and change the life of the person who hears it.'”

The Orthodox believe that worship services should be in the language of the people, the vernacular, so priests and missionaries through history made great efforts and sacrifices to translate the Bible and prayer books. St. Innocent is one I have heard the most about; he traveled by kayak all over the frozen north to minister to the native peoples of Alaska, and learned several languages besides his native Russian.

But we do not read the Scriptures aloud in church in the tones of our everyday speech, even though the words are in our respective languages. If you do that, it is nearly impossible not to emphasize one word over another and lend changeable meaning to the sentences depending on who you are and what assumptions and personality, not to say errors and misunderstandings, you bring with you. The only way to let the words speak for themselves is to chant or sing them without emphasizing one over another.

Scourby was Greek and baptized Orthodox. I wonder if he had a sense of how to read the Bible from hearing it chanted or sung in his youth. His reading resembles the way many ministers in Protestant and even Evangelical churches used to read, and I’m sure some still do, not with a lot of expression, but clearly and reverently.

And why did someone decide to intersperse jaunty electronic quiz-show music in between some tracks? Is that supposed to be the vernacular as well? Petersen says that he wants people to become familiar with “the way God speaks,” and he wants us to be mindful that God in the Incarnation did not take “the role of a sophisticated intellectual.” The style of The Message‘s narrator may not be sophisticated, but it is affected and distracting.

Not that I would give anyone even Alexander Scourby’s Bible readings with the thought that they could know from them alone what Petersen calls “God’s grand rule of love and justice.” God has spoken through His Son, the Word, and the words of the Bible testify that it is the Church, not the scriptures, that is “the fullness of Him who fills all in all.” (Ephesians 1:23) The Church is the only context in which one can learn and live the full meaning of Holy Scripture.

The Scourby readings were, it seems until recently, available for listening for free online. They have been replaced with readings by another man; I haven’t tried them yet.  Audio-Bible provides those new readings online and sells recordings of Alexander Scourby’s Bible in various modern formats. I can see making that investment at a future date. And for the present, I have a portable cassette player for playing my valuable antiques.

Laid is a Word You Should Use

the language, ,

In the process of slowly writing blogs about my recent travels, I’m going to just stick a quick post in here on a completely different topic. Most blog writers are interested in being good writers, so I know you won’t be mad at me if I point out a grammatical error that I’ve only started seeing recently. If you make this error, know that you are in good company with Tiina Nunnally, acclaimed translator of Kristin Lavransdatter. I was surprised to see that she was also confused (several times, so I know it wasn’t a typo) on
Lie and Lay.
There are two verbs, to lie and to lay.

Lie is what you do on a bed, or a beach, to rest, or with your lover. Or what anything can do, remaining in a place. (It’s also when you tell an untruth, but that doesn’t get confused, as far as I know, so I’m not dealing with it now.)

The verb has present and past tenses, of course:

Present tense: I lie on the beach, you lie, he lies, they lie. Lie down, Fido! He was lying there asleep for hours.

Past tense: I lay on the bed yesterday, you lay on the bed yesterday, he lay on the bed, etc.

Past perfect: I have lain on the bed every night, etc.

This is called an intransitive verb, which fact might help someone to understand the difference between it and to lay. That means that there is no action transferred to an object. You don’t lie something, you just lie, period.

Lay is a transitive verb, meaning you do it to something. You might lay the napkin on your lap, or the platter on the table.

Present tense: I lay my head on the pillow, The hen lays an egg, Now I lay me down to sleep.

Past tense: I laid my head on the pillow last night, and my mother laid a quilt over me. The hen laid an egg.

Past perfect: I have laid a blanket on the baby every naptime.

The slang about getting laid, etc. is an irregular usage, and I wonder if it may be the reason people avoid the word laid? This is the new error I am noticing, as in Kristin Lavransdatter, when the translator wrote something like, “He lay his trousers on the bed.” Ouch. You can see that there is never a case when that would be correct.

The problem many people have had for ages is saying lay when they should say lie, as in, “Lay down, Fido!” Ouch. That has possibly become more common than the correct usage, I’m afraid. Oddly, it’s the very people who would never make that mistake who are avoiding laid, which can’t be avoided without making me say Ouch.

The only reason I know these things is because as a child I had to memorize verb tenses. Maybe that tradition was fading out soon after, but for any of you who were shortchanged in school, you could revive the tradition to help yourself. Do it like this:

In a sing-song kind of way, if you like, for To Lie, say:
I lie, you lie, he lies, they lie;
I lay, you lay, he lay, they lay;
I have lain, you have lain, he has lain, they have lain.
Or just the short version : “Lie, lay, lain”

And for To Lay, you could just remind yourself: “Lay, laid, laid.”

If you are still confused, you see how others explain it here or here.

Laid is really a fine word. Don’t neglect it!

Streets of the Modern Wild West

history, odds and ends, the language

In my neighborhood there is a residential street named Filament. When we were first house-hunting here I thought how humiliating, to have to have one’s address be on “Filament Street.” That is not bad at all, I have now discovered.

How would you like to live on Deny Court? I’m not sure if I’d prefer to live there rather than on, say, Pretentious Way. I’d like it better if it were Denial Ct–that is something I can get my mind around, and most people who live in houses have to be personally familiar with the attitude.

In any case, I’d consider it risky to look for a house to buy, in some of the areas of Greater Sacramento where these and other strange names for streets are found. I might fall in love with a house on Elude Ct., and if it were a bargain, I would feel a lot of pressure to sell my literary soul for it. Do good deals tend to come up more often on streets with names like Image, Essence, Adorn and Agree? Perhaps if the quality for which the street is name is positive, like Esteem Ct. or Acclaim Dr., the houses cost more, not less.

Are the houses on Pretentious Way really so? Or are the people who live in them? Perhaps the residents are only illiterate foreigners. Forgive me, but I really can’t imagine. Many questions present themselves, such as, What sort of qualifications does one need to be a street-namer? I suspect that the naming agency nowadays pulls words out of the dictionary by means of a computer database.

As I think about it, many if not most street names that we are used to are concrete nouns, or common or proper names after plants and people, places or events. When you start having words for intangibles, or verbs and modifiers, it is bucking the sensible tradition and causes confusion in the mind every time you turn into your lane.

I didn’t like it when streets in new developments were called “Mountain Ave” or such like, even though there was no elevation even in sight. But at least we know what a mountain is, and it is a simple concrete and neutral thing.

But to live on Proper or Refined or Benevolent: it does sound as though the street, or the houses– or the people?–are being described. I don’t like that. These are all the true names of real residential streets I am listing!

Streets with number or letter names should be considered more, if they are running out of ideas. The picture is of the road on which my childhood home was located, and it had a number for a name. But this is the age when a lot of people make up new names for their children, and perhaps that is the next thing to look for in street names. It will happen in California.

There are also streets named for general categories. The typical School Street or University Ave usually refer to a specific example that is nearby, but one doesn’t usually run across Savant Drive any more than you would see a street named for houses, students, or cars. We might just as well have a street named Avenue, though I didn’t see that one. I did see Component Way, which goes into the same pocket of my mind as Filament Ct.

This aspect of our culture is so vast and jumbled, I am getting more confused and bored as I ramble on. Let me just say that if have to move to Sacramento, the street I will look on is Clarity Court.

In which I am given a prize for my Scribbling…

home, odds and ends, people, the language

Deb on the Run gave me the Superior Scribbler Award while I was across the country and couldn’t properly respond. Now I’m home and can say THANKS Deb! Deb’s own blog is one of my favorites, but I guess I can’t just Back-at-her…no problem, as there are several others I’d like to announce.

But first, here are the rules, for those of you I’ll list below:

  1. Each Superior Scribbler must in turn pass The Award on to 5 most-deserving Bloggy Friends.
  2. Each Superior Scribbler must link to the author & the name of the blog from whom he/she has received The Award.
  3. Each Superior Scribbler must display The Award on his/her blog, and link to This Post, which explains The Award.
  4. Each Blogger who wins The Superior Scribbler Award must visit this post and add his/her name to the Mr. Linky List. That way, we’ll be able to keep up-to-date on everyone who receives This Prestigious Honor![anyone can go there and check out the 1343 ! winning blogs that are linked so far. You might find a new one to love.]
  5. Each Superior Scribbler must post these rules on his/her blog.

And now the awards, to a few of the blogs I like to read regularly:

  • My friend Jeannette at Bread on the Water posts thoughtful musings full of hope and beauty.
  • Gigi at Firefly Cottage writes about homemaking, including wonderful pie recipes.
  • The blog name Happy at Home attracted me when I first saw it, and Laurel’s loving descriptions of her family life keep me coming back.
  • Koinonikon is the name of Margaret’s blog, where her careful writing about the working out of her salvation is a joy to read, and always instructive.
  • If you get me mixed up with the blogger at Lifenut, it is only because her name is Gretchen, too. She is witty and wise and I laugh out loud reading about her family-full days.
As to my own writing, the name Superior Scribbler pleases me very much, as the “Scribbler” part matches my self-concept and attempts to join in that Great Conversation we humans are having. Thank you all for being here in It with me.