Slippery Devils

No one minds that today the clouds are neither in the same position nor in the same shapes they were yesterday – John McWhorter

Words are slippery devils. That’s what I told my friend when he asked me why people often pray in Elizabethan English – you know, prayers filled with thees and thous and a vocabulary that would be more at home in a Shakespearian Inn than one of our local watering holes.

As far as I know, there is no reason for anyone to speak to God (or “of” God) using words from yesteryear. If we did, I think we’d need to go full tilt and pray in ancient Aramaic (the language of Jesus), or Hebrew (the language of Moses). But, like it or not, I think God is quite satisfied to sit a spell and hear us out as we offer our prayers of petition, adoration, confession, or thanksgiving in any way we find most helpful to the cause.

Getting back to words, though, they are always on the move. I notice that when we sing our hymns; lines often end with “word” and “lord” as if they’re supposed to sound the same. The fact is, when those hymns were written, that’s exactly what they did sound like. It was either word pronounced like ward, or Lord pronounced like Lerd (Linguists can tell us how those words have shifted).

I am sometimes called a grammar Nazi, and I suppose I am. Even when I text someone on my cellphone, I use proper spelling and punctuation, sentences complete with subjects and predicates, and with proper nouns capitalized just like they’re supposed to be. I don’t confuse there with their or they’re, nor we with wee. When a text message I send is wrong, it is because the auto-fill has decided it knows better than me what I intended (or is it “better than I what I intended”?). Ugh!

I like English, even when it confuses me. I appreciate rules, grammar and spelling. I enjoy word play, and although I may have fun with language and bristle when an editor removes my Oxford commas (because this is a newspaper and we’re not in Oxford), the fact remains I am not as annoyed as I might let others believe when they use abbreviations, textical shortcuts, or grammatical mistakes.

It is often those mistakes that lead us to recognize something is going on – that something doesn’t make sense; the mistake is often a person’s effort to fix a grammatical problem. For instance, baseball season is upon us. When a batter hits a fly ball to center, we don’t say the batter “flew” out to center, for he’s not a bird; we say he or she “flied” out to center. The normal past tense (flew) is replaced by the more reasonable (flied) because it also fits the pattern we have for cry. The past tense of cry is cried, not crew, so it doesn’t feel wrong for the past tense of fly to be flied, even if we know it is normally flew.

English is quite flexible that way. New words are routinely created for the purpose of conveying an idea in new ways. For instance, you won’t find the word “textical” in the dictionary, but I created it here and now to demonstrate how it is done. The “ical” suffix converts a noun (text) into an adjective (textical), just like it transforms rhetoric (a noun) into rhetorical (a word describing some kind of device in literature or speech).

That brings us back to prayer and matters of faith. Life changes. I gaze at clouds and see how quickly they come and go, their forms shifting under the influence of swirls and eddies of invisible currents.

Faith is like that; it, too, is a slippery devil. It comes and goes, bending with the times, shifting ‘round as needs and wants shift. It must change, or it will go stagnant and die, like ancient Latin or Olde English.

God’s Spirit (spirit means breath, by the way) blows into and over our lives, keeping us fresh, rosy-cheeked, and filled with vitality and love. God’s command to love never changes, but as with words, how it is shaped and defined constantly changes.

God’s love is a slippery devil; it’s always on the move in this, our valley.