not dumbing down
This doesn’t seem to be a good time of life for learning new things. Perceiving, okay not too bad, realizing, discerning, seeing something - ἴδωσιν is the word I’ve always liked from Mark 9:1, root ὁράω I see with my mind, discern, experience, realize, where, perhaps for years having been otherwise orientated, I hadn’t noticed it before, and now feeling like I’d been blind, jiminy why didn’t I ever notice that, it’s right there if you look for it; for example, hints of high christology in Mark’s gospel, okay, I feel like an idiot. But new things, no. Arabic: recently I thought to teach myself something about arabic with help available online, what a beautiful written language, ach du lieber, nothing guttural about arabic, maybe I could learn the squiggles and reading them backwards (backwards: there's a political fox paw). But then starting, I find out arabic is unimaginably complex deep and beyond just what one sees on a page, it’d have to be native to me ever to grasp the nuances.
And what the hell was I thinking anyway, I tried it with Hebrew a few summers ago, fun, lots of fun, I was going to be Hebrew literate before my birthday; but I could hardly remember the alphabet characters from day to day, and then run a string of them together headed west, then dots and ticks and tittles and all sorts of little marks underneath because there are no vowels, I didn’t give up on Hebrew, can’t competently do that in my half-life vocation, but I repair to the interlinears available online, and a site that will read the Hebrew aloud to me. A prob with the interlinears is that some go west and some go east, and not only with the English transliteration headed east while the word above it is going west, which is bad enough, but worse some interlinears rearranging the Hebrew letters themselves to read left to right such that I can’t tell whether the original word is tahposohejgnipmuj or jumpingjehosophat and I just log off and take a nap.
And Greek? Did you ever think of trying to help somebody learn a little Greek for use with New Testament and Septuagint? The alphabet is easy, learned it as a KA pledge at UFla sixty something years ago, and the words, sentences, get easier to read aloud, especially text showing accents and breathing marks and such, noun singulars and plurals okay remembering some of the Latin nominative genitive, dative, accusative, ablative from Miss Hord when I was fourteen and fifteen, and German in college, where unlike English everything is masculine, feminine, neuter; but omega tau phi omicron, Greek verbs have past, present, future, perfectly well done, and not quite having been finished possibilities that bollix the mind, so that now my NT professor is long dead, I show the white feather and resort to BibleHub. Which also will do my OT work for me. It’s about dumbing down.
Why this of an early Donnerstag when my next scheduled sermon is still medium rare? Because a friend stirred my annoyance that one presidential candidate’s vocabulary consists of me, myself, yuuge, and I. And it occurs that Americans are— how you Melicans say it — peculiar? No, doubtful. Politics for Dummies. How to choose a president? Ultimately chosen by the crown, an English bishop is generally a scholar, an American bishop is a popularity contest. I don’t know about British admiralty, but the USN flag officers I watched coming up — never mind, don’t need to go there. Both too late for me anyway, and besides, I can’t even remember — where was I going with that — oh well.
I need a picture. With this blasted daylight savings time it's too early for a sunrise, how about a car. How about a Buick, my all time favorite. Here's a 1934 Buick.
Speaking of which, who else remembers that, unlike the rest of the GM line, which went from the fabric insert roof to the all steel body turret top, the 1935 Buick was identical to the 1934 Buick because the Buick Division had exhausted their budget on other things. To be more complete, I should mention that the 1935 Chevrolet Standard also had the old design roof while the Master DeLuxe had the turret top. Also, to wander off into my own nether land, I think some of the Cadillac line with the Fleetwood bodies.
This is why I can't learn hebrew or arabic or memorize bible verses.
March 17: green beer today.
DThos+
And what the hell was I thinking anyway, I tried it with Hebrew a few summers ago, fun, lots of fun, I was going to be Hebrew literate before my birthday; but I could hardly remember the alphabet characters from day to day, and then run a string of them together headed west, then dots and ticks and tittles and all sorts of little marks underneath because there are no vowels, I didn’t give up on Hebrew, can’t competently do that in my half-life vocation, but I repair to the interlinears available online, and a site that will read the Hebrew aloud to me. A prob with the interlinears is that some go west and some go east, and not only with the English transliteration headed east while the word above it is going west, which is bad enough, but worse some interlinears rearranging the Hebrew letters themselves to read left to right such that I can’t tell whether the original word is tahposohejgnipmuj or jumpingjehosophat and I just log off and take a nap.
And Greek? Did you ever think of trying to help somebody learn a little Greek for use with New Testament and Septuagint? The alphabet is easy, learned it as a KA pledge at UFla sixty something years ago, and the words, sentences, get easier to read aloud, especially text showing accents and breathing marks and such, noun singulars and plurals okay remembering some of the Latin nominative genitive, dative, accusative, ablative from Miss Hord when I was fourteen and fifteen, and German in college, where unlike English everything is masculine, feminine, neuter; but omega tau phi omicron, Greek verbs have past, present, future, perfectly well done, and not quite having been finished possibilities that bollix the mind, so that now my NT professor is long dead, I show the white feather and resort to BibleHub. Which also will do my OT work for me. It’s about dumbing down.
Why this of an early Donnerstag when my next scheduled sermon is still medium rare? Because a friend stirred my annoyance that one presidential candidate’s vocabulary consists of me, myself, yuuge, and I. And it occurs that Americans are— how you Melicans say it — peculiar? No, doubtful. Politics for Dummies. How to choose a president? Ultimately chosen by the crown, an English bishop is generally a scholar, an American bishop is a popularity contest. I don’t know about British admiralty, but the USN flag officers I watched coming up — never mind, don’t need to go there. Both too late for me anyway, and besides, I can’t even remember — where was I going with that — oh well.
I need a picture. With this blasted daylight savings time it's too early for a sunrise, how about a car. How about a Buick, my all time favorite. Here's a 1934 Buick.
Speaking of which, who else remembers that, unlike the rest of the GM line, which went from the fabric insert roof to the all steel body turret top, the 1935 Buick was identical to the 1934 Buick because the Buick Division had exhausted their budget on other things. To be more complete, I should mention that the 1935 Chevrolet Standard also had the old design roof while the Master DeLuxe had the turret top. Also, to wander off into my own nether land, I think some of the Cadillac line with the Fleetwood bodies.
This is why I can't learn hebrew or arabic or memorize bible verses.
March 17: green beer today.
DThos+