Hunting down quotations is one of the most delightful of occupations, and a Briefing reader set me upon the track of the expression in the teeth of our exertions—employed by Spurgeon in one of his sermons. What, I was asked, does Spurgeon mean, and where did he get this expression from? (more…)
Archives: kel-richards
Word Watch: Mystery
Word Watch
I grew up thinking that a ‘mystery’ was a book written by Agatha Christie or one of her ilk. At the heart of such a book was an impenetrable puzzle that only a great detective could solve. The best of these, for me, were John Dickson Carr’s impossible “locked room” mysteries in which the victim would be found in a hermetically sealed room (all the doors and windows locked on the inside). Only a genius could solve a mystery of that order. (more…)
Wordwatch: Martyr
Word Watch
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs was published in 1559, running to a total of 732 pages (in Latin). The first English edition appeared in 1563 and was followed by steadily enlarged editions in 1570, 1576 and 1583. The author, John Foxe (1516-1587), was one of those ministers who fled to the continent during the reign of Mary Tudor when Protestants were being burned at the stake, returning only when the first Elizabeth ascended the throne and the persecution ended. (more…)
WordWatch: Idioms begat by the Bible
Word Watch
In 2011 we’ve been celebrating the 400th birthday of the King James Bible. Bible societies across the English-speaking world organized appropriate festivities, and used the occasion to draw attention to the Bible’s sweeping social and cultural influence over the last 400 years. Language is one place where the Bible has had a powerful impact. (more…)
WordWatch: Skin of our teeth
Word Watch
It’s a cliché that turns up in bad journalism and badly written TV and movie melodramas: “It was a very close shave, and they only escaped by the skin of their teeth”. (more…)
Speaking of miracles
Thought
Do miracles occur today? If we evangelicals express caution in response to a question like that, we’re either accused of being Cessationists or told that we lack real faith in the God who is the same yesterday, today and forever. (more…)
Review: “The third choice”
Review
The Third Choice: Islam, Dhimmitude and Freedom
Mark Durie
Deror Books, Melbourne, 269pp.
The image of giant passenger airliners being flown into the twin towers in New York remains burnt into our retinas. For those of us in the West, it remains a baffling puzzle: what could motivate anyone to do that? (more…)
WordWatch: Filthy lucre
Word Watch
There was a time when if you wanted to speak disparagingly of money you would call it ‘filthy lucre’. It was, for as long as I can remember, a whimsical expression. If a friend accepted a new job at higher pay you might, for example, make a flippant remark about his going for the ‘filthy lucre’. (more…)
WordWatch: Questions, questions, questions
Word Watch
We live in an age that thinks we should question everything. The bored, affluent culture around us is convinced that there are no answers, only questions. We live in a cynical, sceptical society that views the only worthwhile intellectual activities as being questioning, disputing, arguing and challenging. Furthermore, when you’ve tested something, you ought to move on and test something else. The goal is an open mind, with every fresh set of questions washing in one side and out the other. (more…)
WordWatch: Ivory tower
Word Watch
Today, we think of an ‘ivory tower’ as a place where you are separated from the flow of ordinary life. We are most likely to use ‘ivory tower’ when speaking of academics—on the rather quaint notion that they only need to understand the philosophy of the later Middle Ages, or the conjugation of irregular verbs in Urdu (or whatever), and that their specialist knowledge somehow puts them out of touch with the ‘real world’. (more…)
WordWatch: Jeremiah
Word Watch
If someone accuses you of being ‘a real Jeremiah’, what are they saying about you? Is it a compliment or an insult? Last year, Anu Garg had a go at offering a definition. For the uninitiated (i.e. the non-word-obsessives), Anu is the Indian-born, American computer and word geek who runs ‘A Word a Day’ (http://wordsmith.org/awad), a free daily email newsletter with 600,000 subscribers in 200 countries. What did he make of ‘Jeremiah’? Here’s his explanation:
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Professor
Word Watch
Are you a professor of Christianity?
Today we tend to use the word ‘professor’ to mean “a teacher of the highest rank in a university department” (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English). Mind you, Americans often apply the title to any teacher at college level, and, in Aussie English, ‘professor’ can be used jokingly of anyone who either has, or pretends to have, a lot of knowledge. So today the word ‘professor’ is linked to this notion of having a great deal of knowledge. (more…)
WordWatch: Professor
Word Watch
Today we tend to use the word ‘professor’ to mean “a teacher of the highest rank in a university department” (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English). Mind you, Americans often apply the title to any teacher at college level, and, in Aussie English, ‘professor’ can be used jokingly of anyone who either has, or pretends to have, a lot of knowledge. So today the word ‘professor’ is linked to this notion of having a great deal of knowledge. (more…)
A house divided
Word Watch
Over the centuries, the Bible has contributed many familiar, everyday expressions to the English language—far more than most 21st-century unbelievers would be prepared to credit. For example, there’s the expression ‘a house divided’. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech at the Republican State Convention in Illinois in which he said, (more…)
Environmentalism
Life, Word Watch
It’s the ‘ism’ that makes all the difference. The ‘environment’ is just all the stuff around us. ‘Environment’ is first recorded in 1830, and comes from the much earlier word ‘environ’, which, in turn, is first recorded in one of Wycliffe’s sermons from 1375. ‘Environ’ comes from an Old French word meaning “that which makes a circuit (or veers) around us”.