More than 34 years ago when I showed up to this Southern city, a woman called the church office and I answered the phone. I gave her the information she was seeking and then, a moment later, she called back. "I just wanted to hear your accent again. Could you say something?" At that point I suggested that having been born and raised in the Midwest I did not have an accent as the people in the South clearly did. I also reminded her that newscasters tended to come from the Midwest because they did not have a pronounced accent. Accents are quaint and I love them but sometimes they get in the way of communication. My wife once commented that she had to go to the most Southern nurse in her unit to translate what a good ole boy in the hospital had said. Unfortunately, even that woman raised in the hills of Tennessee did not have a clue what the man was saying. In this case, it was not simply the accent but laziness. In college we had a kid who earned the nickname "Mushmouth" because no one could understand him. He had a lazy tongue.
While this is a mere irritation when I hear a weatherman on TV say "tempachure" for temperature or hear everywhere the incessant addition of letters to some words (like "shtruggle" for struggle) or the omission of letters from other words (like "ax" for ask) or the emphasis on another s when there is not supposed to be one (like "Jesuseses" for Jesus'), it becomes a larger issue and a bigger problem when this is translated into other areas of communication. It seems that we all have learned to have a lazy tongue. We treat the language as if it were a private and personal concern. We do not adhere to the rules of grammar or pronunciation. We are lazy. But this impreciseness has spilled over into a variety of areas. We are lazy about more than the way we write or speak. The presumption that these do not matter is contributing to the decline in our ability to enunciate the words and what we mean as well as maintain a clarity of language. Nowhere is this more of a problem than in the Church. In too many places gobbledygook has replaced the traditional vocabulary of doctrine and liturgy. Words that mean little mean even less because they allow a width of meaning and a confusion to reign precisely where clarity and truth require more.
Okay. Rant off.
3 comments:
"Nuclear" is not pronounced "NOOK yuh ler".
"Nucleus" is not pronounced as "NU ku lus".
"Nuclide" is not pronounced as "NOOK lee ide".
Funny topic. They say language and speech habits are acquired early on, because through phonetics we learn to hear and pronounce words from those around us. Growing up on Long Island, we were surrounded by people who came mostly from the boroughs of New York City. My father had a Bronx accent, while my mother came from Queens. My wife came from Brooklyn. Even in school, most of our teachers were born and raised in the metropolitan areas of downstate New York. We were taught the wrong way to pronounce words in the English language early in life, and only a strong effort to improve our vocabulary and pronunciation can remove our New York roots from daily speech. Even well educated New Yorkers often speak like a dock worker moving pallets of fish in the days of the Fulton Fish Market, now gone forever. Language is always evolving, and dialects are regional and local. Did you ever listen to an upper class Brit and compare their speech to a Cockney Englishman? The reality is that pet peave or not, language is affected by locality. Of course, it is best to speak English correctly, but don’t expect others to do so. It is because their manner of speech is part of their regional identity, and most people will never consciously give it up. For preachers of the Gospel, it may be a challenge to relate in some communities, but the message remains the same. God’s love is still taught, however it is expressed. Soli Deo Gloria
Gobbledygook has also replaced the traditional vocabulary of doctrine in dealing with Christ’s words in Matthew 23:9. Rather than obeying Christ’s words in the context they were spoken, the context is broadened (or ignored) and Christ’s proscription is reinterpreted to make it appear that Christ is forbidding children from calling their male biological parent “father”. Then this “reductio ad absurdum” argument is used to override what Christ said and to allow called pastors to use and refer to each other with the title of “Father”.
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