I Had No Idea I Was So Annoying

Apparently the general public despises my default casual reply to "Thanks." I'm sure that I say "No problem" all the time. I never meant anything by it--it's just one of those pieces of the politeness script that one has to deploy in the conversation ritual.

But it turns out that what people hear when I say "No problem" is "a problem caused by you will be graciously ignored." That's according to the readers of Stanley Fish's blog at nytimes.com. Check it out for a list of niceties that they don't find so nice.

I can't agree with most of the list. I do find the corporation-speak offensive: "Your call is important to us"; "For your convenience"; "In order to serve you better." These are expressions that no normal human being would come up with--they spring from spin sessions. They are nakedly disingenuous, each one a malevolent "This is not a pipe."

But most of the things people complain about on Fish's blog aren't in this class. "Is everything all right?"; "Take care"; "Have a nice day." People seriously have a problem with these?

John M. Ellis wants you to know that the Brothers Grimm are frauds

In One Fairy Story too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales, Ellis documents the evidence for Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm's deceptions and takes folklore scholars to task for stubbornly ignoring this evidence. The Grimms come off looking like a pair of undergraduates faking their research paper; Grimm scholars wind up looking like willfully blind burghers who can't bring themselves to admit that the emperor has no clothes.

Incidentally, "The Emperor's New Clothes" is not one of the stories collected in Grimms' Fairy Tales (auf Deutsch, Kinder- und Hausmarchen); that fairy tale was composed by Hans Christian Andersen. Andersen and the Grimms are traditionally juxtaposed: Andersen was an artist, writing his own fairy tales; the Grimms were scientists, merely collecting and reporting the indigenous tales of Germany. Ellis's book shows that

(1) The Grimms claimed to be just that, scientific collectors and preservers of indigenous German tales;

BUT

(2) Their sources were almost entirely drawn from their immediate social sphere: young, local, middle-class, educated, and in many cases, French-speaking;
(3) Far from preserving the wording and content of their sources, the Grimms constantly reworked the material;
(4) This reworking involved substantive changes, including taking out sexually suggestive elements, making the "good guys" better and the "bad guys" worse, and generally making the stories less wild and more rational.

I found Ellis convincing, and I'm surprised that I've never heard his polemic, even though the book was published in 1983. The most disappointing part for me is losing the image of the Grimms as ethnographers: tramping through the German countryside, listening to toothless old women and furiously scribbling down notes. They cultivated that image by, for example, listing the source of one story as "the River Main region" and another as "Cassel"--when in fact, both stories had come from members of the same family (the Hassenpflugs), who had lived in both places but were originally of French Hugenot extraction. This is what we call "fudging the data."

Sigh. I guess the movie got it half right--unfortunately, it was the con artist half, not the traveling-across-Germany half.

Stuff Christians Like: Samaritan's Purse

Mrs. Chaka and I just contributed to Samaritan's Purse at the urging of Stuff Christians Like. After raising $30,000 to build a kindergarten in Vietnam in one day, they're now raising funds for two more.

I'm not much for giving to a cause just because a celebrity says I should, but I figured it's the least we could do for a blog that has the funniest (and most edifying) comments on the entire internet.

Linus has probably blown his entire paycheck on this.

I love how for xkcd, Ender's Game is a shared text

Learn to Stay Away from Those Who Carry 'Round a Fire Hose

You could call me a Bob Dylan fan; my music collection has more albums by him than by any other artist. I acknowledge that he's an acquired taste, though. The first time I heard him on the radio ("Like a Rolling Stone" on 98.7 FM KISD), I thought it was a joke. What was this doing on Oldies radio? Organ music and a guy who can't sing? When it went on and on for minute after minute, I thought it was a joke on an immense scale. Then the song ended, and the next song began, without a single word from the DJ to explain what had just happened. Apparently, everyone else was in on the joke.

I think I heard other Dylan songs eventually--"Rainy Day Women #12 & 35" at least--but it wasn't until I found out that he was a Minnesotan and had spent time around the University of Minnesota that I picked up one of his albums (Bob Dylan). I knew he was supposed to be cool, so I listened to it over and over again until I liked it. Honestly, that's pretty much what I did. When I found another album in the used bin at Cheapo, I'd buy it and repeat the process.

"Like a Rolling Stone" has grown on me somewhat, but it's still not my favorite. "Subterranean Homesick Blues" probably tops my list. I like the personal connection to "Positively Fourth Street" (I lived for three years in Dinkytown, on the titular Fourth Street). I drive Mrs. Chaka crazy by playing "You Ain't Going Nowhere" over and over again on our cheap acoustic guitar.

I say all that to say this: like Andrew Ferguson (HT: JT), I have no idea why people continue to revere Dylan and buy his albums, when he is in no way the artist he used to be. He never really sang the notes, but his inimitable style did have some charm and emotional resonance. Now his voice is shot so badly that he has only two notes, and only one emotional register: deep mortal anguish.

If Ferguson is right about what's going on inside Dylan's head, then maybe I wasn't so wrong when I heard his music for the first time. Maybe it is a joke on a massive scale.

M. Levi-Strauss

I had no idea that Levi-Strauss was still alive. And now he's not.

Pretty shameful ignorance for someone who considers himself a casual Levi-Straussian.

Etymological Fables

Today I came across a word history of sincere that seems impossible. According to the story, Latin potters would sometimes use wax to conceal cracks in their products. Vendors in the marketplace, knowing that the buyers were wary of this ruse, would praise their wares as sin cera--without wax.

(Are there any valid etymologies that end with ". . . so people used to say ________"?)

The author of this word history intended to illustrate that sincerity requires allowing the cracks to show. A good point to make, especially in a church context, where there is great pressure to conceal our weaknesses. Somehow this etymological fable is less offensive to my sensibilities because the point isn't really the etymology. One can think of it as an elaborate pun, a just-so story, rather than a statement about the origin of sincere.

But what is the true etymon of sincere? Merriam-Webster's tentatively traces it to "sem- one + -cerus (akin to Latin crescere to grow)." The New Century Dictionary follows a similar line, associating the initial syllable with the sim- in Latin simplex. The OED concurs and explicitly puts down those Latin pottery merchants: "There is no probability in the old explanation from sine cera ‘without wax’."

It's disappointing that only Merriam-Webster's ventures a guess at the second half of the word. If the "without wax" story is well-known enough for the OED to knock it down, there must be some vigorous discussion somewhere of what that second element is. I submit the question to Professor Liberman and his legendary database.

And while he's pondering wax, perhaps he'd care to comment on the relationship between the English noun wax and the verb wax. According to the OED, "it seems not impossible" that the two share a common etymon (wax being "that which grows (in the honeycomb)"), but "the view now most in favour refers the word to the Indogermanic root *weg- to weave." Merriam-Webster's etymology of sincere seems to imply that the Latin words for wax (the noun) and grow share a common origin.

Books Half Read

I just re-read Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Highly recommended. Don't let your eyes glaze over during the dialogs and arguments: them's the best parts. Now I want to read more about several important figures in the book: Roger Bacon, William of Ockham, Aristotle, Dante. But first, I have to finish the following (half-read) books:

Lush Life by Richard Price
Public Enemies by Bryan Burroughs
The Lighthouse by P. D. James
The Next Christendom by Philip Jenkins

Then there are the two books Jon loaned to me:

And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer
Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI

That last one was lent well over a year ago, and I don't think I'm halfway through it yet. I'm such a loser. What would Teddy Roosevelt think?

A Sad State of Literary Affairs

A coworker recently spent a few days biking in Iowa and Minnesota. He passed through the town of Luverne, MN, where I was born. There's not much in Luverne to awe the world-weary traveler, so I didn't know if it would leave an impression on him.

Unfortunately, it did.

He had stopped in Luverne hoping to pick up a book. He told me that he always travels with a paperback, but had forgotten one on this trip. He claims to have gone to ten different places trying to buy a book, but couldn't get one anywhere. People reportedly returned his request with puzzled stares: "You mean, like a storybook?"

Now, some exaggeration is surely involved here: I doubt whether Luverne has ten businesses that would seem even remotely likely to carry novels. Nonetheless, I'm embarrassed that the town of my birth could not provide for my friend's literary needs. This has shamed not only Luverne, but all of southwest Minnesota--even the great state of Minnesota itself.

Loopy's, I'm ashamed of you. Pamida, I used to hold you in such esteem.

Our Ford

Elliot at All Is Grist (named after the first work by Chesterton that I read!) talks about defining evangelicalism, a topic touched upon in this blog. I would agree that evangelicalism is not quite the right word to describe Henry Ford's adventures in Brazil. In Chesterton's taxonomy, Ford might qualify as a Puritan because of his anti-alcohol stance, but an Episcopalian who believes in reincarnation (per Wikipedia) scarcely qualifies as an evangelical.

I know you're not supposed to cite Wikipedia, yeah yeah, blah blah blah, but some articles make for great reading. I had no idea that Europeans (particularly Germans) had such a fixation with him. It makes the premise of Brave New World more understandable.

What's the opposite of uber?

I'm wearing my mustaches long these days, but I am not a fan of Nietzsche. I am in his debt today, however, for a new line of self-interrogation. (That is what philosophers are good for, right?) I read this description of Nietzsche's critique of Christian morality (from Joseph Ratzinger's Jesus of Nazareth):

"Nietzsche sees the vision of the Sermon on the Mount as a religion of resentment, as the envy of the cowardly and incompetent, who are unequal to life's demands and try to avenge themselves by blessing their failure and cursing the strong, the successful, and the happy."

I suddenly asked myself, "Am I a Christian because I'm weak?"

The argument could be made. I'm certainly much better off in a Christian-influenced environment than in a world of supermen. As a short, nearsighted man with rather slow reflexes and not much skill at making money, I wouldn't fare so well among the strong and successful, especially if they were cut loose from law and conscience.

I remember a moment in elementary school when I informed a persecutor that, in the way he was treating me, he "wasn't being very Christian." But he was a superman--the tallest kid in fifth grade--and he responded simply, "I'm not a Christian." Didn't know what to say to that.

So I am capable of using Christian morality in the service of power, attempting to control others who are stronger than me. Even if it doesn't work very often (I actually can only think of times when it failed), I should pay attention to this capability. When are my appeals to God's favor for the weak mere power plays for my own advantage? Thank you, Nietzsche, for this.

At the same time, I wholeheartedly embrace Christian morality and God's favor for the weak. What's right is right, even if my motives for supporting it will never be purely right.

My current leather possessions are limited to a wallet and some belts

"Logos Bible Software is celebrating the launch of their new online Bible by giving away 72 ultra-premium print Bibles at a rate of 12 per month for six months. The Bible giveaway is being held at Bible.Logos.com and you can get up to five different entries each month! After you enter, be sure to check out Logos and see how it can revolutionize your Bible study."

Well, it's a new month, and that means it's time to enter again in Logos Bible Software's luxury Bible giveaway. I've entered every month so far, but I haven't wanted to enter by writing a blog post; I figured I would look pretty shallow writing about a contest just to be entered into the contest. Thankfully, because of Lingamish's recent rant about the giveaway, I have a pretext to write a post.

Lingamish hasn't shamed me into not trying to win a luxury Bible, but he has reminded me anew that English-language Bible resources are wasted on speakers of the English language. There is a great hunger abroad for good tools for interpreting the Bible, but many obstacles stand in the way. A lack of workers, copyright issues, poverty, lack of technology. Meanwhile, Bible publishers, one of which is my esteemed employer (I speak entirely in earnest), continue to crank out new repackages of the English Bible. People keep buying them, even though (according to this website, which was the first hit on Google), 92% of American homes have a Bible--and among those 92%, the average number of Bibles is three.*

By contrast, 200 million people don't have the Bible in their own language.

Lingamish has 6 things you can do about this. I'm not saying you shouldn't try to win one of Logos's Bibles, but maybe you can do one of these, too. I'll add a seventh option:

7. Give to one of Wycliffe Bible Translators' current projects.

*I have over twenty Bibles on my shelves (not counting electronic versions), but what can I say? I would really enjoy getting one of the leather-bound copies Logos is giving away. I'm hoping for the TNIV (currently a lacuna in my library).

You know what I miss?

The Secret Diary of D. A. Carson.