Here is today's vocabulary word:  hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia, which means fear of the number 666.  

Tags: words

Today I was reading something on Kindle.  In one place a word was divided up incorrectly.  One line ended with "pronoun- "

and the next line began with  "cement".  It took me a second to figure out what was going on.  What is pronoun cement?  It must be a concrete way to make your writing cohere as a unity.  (At least that is my pronouncement for today.)

Tags: humor, words

In reading the prophetic books of the Bible, it can sometimes be difficult to keep track of who the speaker is in a given passage.  The identity of the speaker can change abruptly.  Sometimes the prophet will be talking, and sometimes God will be speaking directly.

And then there are times when there seem to be two divine figures speaking.  Early Christians noticed a number of such passages and saw them as evidence for the deity of Jesus. 

There is a new book on this phenomenon--recognizing more than one person of the Godhead in a biblical passage.  The technical term for this is prosopological exegesis.  I believe "prosopological" means "having to do with persons."

Tags: books, words

In reading the Minor Prophets this year, we have run into lots of wordplay. The technical term for punning is

paronomasia.

Micah, in particular, includes plenty of paronomasia in his prophecy--e.g., in 1:10-16 and 6:3-4.

Micah 6:3-4 says that rather than making the children of Israel tired of him, God had brought them up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. The Hebrew words for "made tired" and "brought up" are very similar.

Since this pun deals with Israel's rescue from Egypt, is it an example of pharaoh-nomasia?

Tut tut, you say?  Well, we should also consider puns about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.  Surely any scholar worth his (pillar of) salt knows that those should be called pyronomasia.   

Tags: words

Over at the Bible and Interpretation website, an article has recently been posted with the title "Butchering the Bible".

The article begins by butchering the English language:

"The Bible is the greatest selling book of all-time, and perhaps, also the most debated. While, for the most part, its basic tenants can be agreed upon, much is misunderstood. "

I wasn't able to read past this part.  The Bible is not an apartment complex, so it doesn't have tenants, basic or otherwise--at least as far as I know.

If the Bible does have tenants, who are the landlords?  Is it rented out by the verse?  How many people can rent a given verse, and for how long?  Are there different rents for different translations?  Are time shares available?  

Tags: words

Here's a good vocabulary word for those who enjoy theological speculation and want to distinguish such speculation from dogma:

Theologoumenon:

A theological statement which is of individual opinion and not doctrine.

Tags: words

Doug learned a new word this week--illeist, a person who talks about himself in the third person.

We tend to joke about illeism.   People in southwestern Ohio remember Chad Johnson, the egocentric wide receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals, who sometimes referred to himself as 85, his uniform number.

I found out about the word from a fascinating article by Bible scholar Andrew S. Malone.  Malone shows that illeism is very common in the Bible--think for example of the phrase "Son of Man", Jesus' self-designation--and is used for various stylistic reasons.  

Tags: words

In preparing for a small group study of Hosea Chapter 8, I learned a new word:

pseudosorites

A pseudosorites is a literary construction that has one of these two basic structures:

X is going to happen; but if X does not happen, it doesn't matter anyway.

Or

X is not going to happen; but if X does happen, it still doesn't matter.

There is a good article on this sort of construction that appeared in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society in 2010. It turns out that there are a number of these in the Bible. The most famous is probably the one in Dan 3:16-18, a strong statement of faith:

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego replied to the king, "O Nebuchadnezzar, we do not need to defend ourselves before you in this matter. If we are thrown into the blazing furnace, the God we serve is able to save us from it, and he will rescue us from your hand, O king. But even if he does not, we want you to know, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the image of gold you have set up."

Another is this promise from God...

Tags: words

In the latest Monk novel (the 16th in the series), Adrian is called in to investigate the death of a man who has been poisoned.

Captain Stottlemeyer tries to hide the fact that the man made his living as a clown, because Monk is afraid of clowns. It turns out that the fear of clowns is called coulrophobia, today's vocabulary word of the day.

At the beginning of the book, narrator Natalie Teeger reveals that Monk has a notebook listing his 100 phobias. The fear of clowns is near the bottom of the list--number 99--because clowns are relatively rare and easy to avoid.  (Number 100 is aardvarks.) 

Tags: words

The advent of ebook technology is enabling authors to make their out-of-print books available to new audiences.  If the authors charge, say, a buck or two for the books on Kindle, they can supplement their incomes nicely.  And they can pick up some extra reviews for their books by occasionally making them free for a short time.

I follow a blog that gives daily lists of free kindle books, xome of which I end up enjoying.  Today while proctoring a calculus exam I was looking at one of the kindle freebies, a novel about an English professor/private detective in Los Angeles named Simeon Grist.  Author Timothy Hallinan originally released the series back in the 1990s.

Popular fiction doesn't usually offer much in the way of vocabulary building, but this book at one point used the word "inspissate", which means to thicken.  While looking up the word in the Kindle's dictionary, I remembered that a year ago I ran across another interesting word, floccinaucinihilipilification, while reading one of Paul Levine's Jake Lassiter novels, another series from the 90s.

Tags: amazon kindle, books, words

Last night I was reading a murder mystery on Kindle when I ran into a word I'd never seen before:

 floccinaucinihilipilification

The handy Kindle dictionary helped me out, telling me that this word refers to the practice of estimating something to be worthless.  

So is the definition of this obscure word a piece of useless knowledge?  If you think so, you yourself have been guilty of floccinaucinihilipilification.

Tags: humor, words

Sherry told me today that there might be rain this afternoon, and there would be a meteor shower on Friday.

Then for some reason I started thinking about what it might mean for a shower to be "meatier", since "meaty" isn't an adjective usually applied to showers. It must have been too close to lunchtime.

Tags: current events, words