Passing-Thought

When did angels become female?

I've often wondered--especially around Christmas time--when angels first became female. One of the most common ornaments on Christmas trees is a woman angel perched on top. The woman who is most revered in modern love songs is affectionately called "an angel". We take that for granted in our society, even in church. But angels in the Bible, as far as I can tell, are primarily, if not exclusively masculine in identity, having great stature, brilliant in appearance, and always a cause of fear and trembling upon human encounter (unlike cute little baby cupids).

A few years ago, I visited the Carnegie-Mellon Natural Museum of Arts and history, and saw several ancient pulpits and other Christian architectures with angels engraved on them. These angels typically had long hair. I wonder if at some point when having long hair was primarily a female fashion, if these images got re-interpretted as feminine. Just a guess.

Do birds ever fall from the sky?

I saw one of the coolest things on my way down to Dallas last Thursday. Within a hundred feet or so from my car, hawk fell straight down from the sky onto the median on I35 near Gainsville, TX. If it was an attack manuever, I would have expected a swooping motion. This, however, was straight down, as if it had died in the air. To my surprise the hawk reemerged from the ground flying upward in my rear-view mirror. attack maneuver.

But the thought still lingered with me: Why is it that I've never seen a bird die mid-flight (naturally)? I suppose birds spend most of their time perched. And if they are sick or dying from natural causes, they might not feel well enough to fly.

Speaking "literally"

A friend studying linguistics recently recounted her frustration growing up trying to understand what "literally" literally means. As soon as she thought she understood its meaning she'd hear it used in a way that seemed opposite of its literal meaning (e.g. "I literally ran into her at the store.").

lit·er·al·ly
adv.

1. In a literal manner; word for word: translated the Greek passage literally.
2. In a literal or strict sense: Don't take my remarks literally.
3. Usage Problem.
   1. Really; actually: “There are people in the world who literally do not know how to boil water” (Craig Claiborne).
   2. Used as an intensive before a figurative expression.

Usage Note: For more than a hundred years, critics have remarked on the incoherency of using literally in a way that suggests the exact opposite of its primary sense of “in a manner that accords with the literal sense of the words.” In 1926, for example, H.W. Fowler cited the example “The 300,000 Unionists... will be literally thrown to the wolves.” The practice does not stem from a change in the meaning of literally itself--if it did, the word would long since have come to mean “virtually” or “figuratively”--but from a natural tendency to use the word as a general intensive, as in They had literally no help from the government on the project, where no contrast with the figurative sense of the words is intended.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

2004 Hawaii Trip (Friday & Saturday, May 21-22)

Friday evening we said our "farewell" to Harlan & Dana since they had only agreed to let us stay with them for the first week. Before we left, I cleaned the bathroom, washed the bedsheets, and left a note: "Thanks for putting us up (and thanks for putting up with us)".

First, we went to the Crossroads Coffee House at Scoffield Barraks Army base. It is a Christian ministry which used to focus on single soldiers, but now it also ministers wives and children of soldiers are in Iraq. I had a latte while Bill had a fruit drink. After Bill showed some little kids up on how many mini-basketball goals he could make in 1 minute, he beat me at a game of pool. We helped the staff clean up afterwards and headed over to Pastor Pete's.

Bill had planned to ask Pastor Pete if we could stay with him, but Pete was sorry to inform us that he had already promised to host a Campus Crusade missionary. But he did remind us of some things we could help him with at the church building construction site, so we planned to help out Saturday morning. We said that it was okay if he could not provide us shelter. We could just sleep out in the car in the driveway. After Bill menaced Pete's personal administrator Cecil, we decided it would be safer to stay somewhere else.

We found lodging at the Navy base at Pearl Harbor in the Bachelor Officer Quarters (BOQ). The apartment was nice, especially for $25/night.

Saturday morning, we went to Pastor Pete's house and he sent us to City Mill (home/garden/hardware) store in a pickup truck to find some trash bags, before meeting him at the church construction site. At City Mill, I called and asked Pastor Pete if he could bring some sun-block from his house, and he suggest that I also look for a hat. So I asked a man there where the hats were. The garden hats reminded me of what chinese rice farmers wear. Unfortunately they didn't have a small size. The man asked if there was anything else he could help with, so I asked him if they had a Hanzo sword. At first he didn't understand what I was asking, but then he said, "No, I think you need to ask Uma Thurman for that."

We met Pastor Pete at the construction site and he showed us what needed to be done. The first thing we did was pick up several pieces of scrap metal, pieces of wood, and boxes to take to the dump. Then Bill wacked weeds while I weeded the flowers. Scott & Athen passed by on their motorcycle and waved. (Apparently Scott had been doing this kind of stuff while Bill was gone. So he was glad to have a break.) Then we loaded up the back of the pickup with some cinder blocks for Pastor Pete's back-yard. Apparently Pete's next door neighbor had complained that his air-conditioner unit was too loud, so Pete went out of his way to create a sound-box for it with the blocks, so they could run the air-conditioner at night.

Bill and I mowed Pastor Pete's yard and he provided us dinner--chicken salad. Pete had felt bad that our meal on Wednesday at Long John Silver's had made me sick, so he wanted to give me something with more green and less grease. Not bad. We helped Pete's wife Martha with the kitchen. It was not long before we started talking about relationships and then she asked me whether or not I was interested in someone and about the kind of girl I was looking for. (Bill tells me she is matchmaker minded.) We talked about that for some time, until I asked her about her thoughts on the courtship vs. dating issue. She seemed a little defensive when I tried to argue the courtship line (though I did not know it well enough to defend it).

To be quite honest, Friday & Saturday nights seem jumbled in my mind, but to the best I can recall, on Saturday Bill drove around several places and neighborhoods he had known. After walking on a couple of military beaches, we visited the family of his friend Clark. Clark showed us his civil-war industrial-strengthed iron coffee grinder and let us taste his home grown cherry tomotoes. His accent reminded me of my uncle Jerry, so I asked him if he was from Broklyn. He told me he was from that region in New York, an Italian with catholic roots. We spent a while watching famous clips of rodeo bull riders. Each of those cowboys must have their own personal chiropractor. And I wondered what the average lifespan is for the rodeo clowns that throw themselves in front of the bulls to distract them from the dismantled bullriders.

what's funner than more fun?

Is 'fun' a noun only or can it properly be used as an adjective?

Just for fun, I did a google search on "funner". I quickly found two sites that discuss this fun problem (reaching somewhat different conclusions).

Questions & Answers: Funner and funnest (from a Brittish perspective)

The Fuss About "Fun": "Fun" As An Adjective (American grad student in Comparative Studies)

Fun, fun!

philosophical humor for dispair

Bill sometimes spontaneously asks a philosophical sounding question that no one can answer. I've observed the following questions to be rhetorical, trying to make light of his own deep existential questions concerning Christian hope and identity (in the midst of personal desparation or dispair).

1) "Are we there yet?"

"there" refers to heaven. Thus the question rhetorically asks, "When are all my struggles and problems going to be over with?" and implies that heaven seems too far away from the present.

2) "Where are we?" / "When are we?" / "Why are we?"

These questions are similar to "Are we there yet?", indicating feelings of disorientation concerning one's purpose, identity, and existential worth (see Ecclesiastes). They often occur in the order given, with special emphasis upon the "to be" verb or the adverb ("Where", "When", "Why").

ironic conversational discourse

One of the most common (and confusing) phenomena in Bill's semantics is his principle of spontaneous irony (i.e. to say the opposite of what is literally meant, or some exaggerated or inverted permutation). This principle of irony can be observed in any part of speech that will affect the apparent meaning of the sentence. In case of a word-irony, special emphasis is often given to the word that has been changed. Bill's ironic discourse often occurs with reference to the semantic domain of time; it is often in the imperative or interrogative mood.

Examples

1) Verbal irony

Normally, verbal-irony occurs by preterization (i.e. changing the present tense of the verb to past tense).

B: "What time was it?" (What time is it?)

B: "May I borrow [your stick of gum]?" (May I have...?)

2) Nominal/pro-nominal irony

B: "Can you hold on just an hour?" (just a minute)

B: "Thank me." (Thank you.)

3) Prepositional irony

B: "That's what I'm trying to figure in." (figure out)

B: "When are we getting down?" (when are we getting up?)

"bob"-- Bill's generic noun-masker

The nominal function of "bob" was one of Bill's favorite linguistic jokes. It is essentially a replacer noun that phonetically masks another noun whose identity must be determined by the context. It functions phonetically to mislead, confuse, or throw the recipient off-guard for humor, and it usually occurs in response to a recipient's question. Often "bob" is used in place of a word that shares a phonetic property (such as beginning with b-consonant or the o-vowel as in dog.) And although there is a high probability that "bob" will mask a noun that it has already masked in the past, Bill could spontaneously adapt it for any noun occassion.

Examples

1) Proper Noun

Most often as proper noun it means "Bill".

X: "Hello, who is this?"
B: "Bob" (meaning "Bill" a.k.a. "L.L. Cool-J")

2) Noun

X: "Can you give me your email address?"
B: "Yeah, it's LLcoolJ at yahoo dot bob" (yahoo dot com)

"messy love" by Eric Pyle (2/14/2002)

Sometimes love is a messy room missing all its pretty flowers, a fairy tale frozen from its first kiss, a conversation never spoken...

"the exile" by Eric Pyle (Jan 2002)

Who would've thought we'd see such a dawn, the blind of the scorch from the west?
What screeching sorrow muffles to the ear, a song in the silence of its rest,
When clenched mouth doth sour, and tongue the driest pallet doth taste,
Where all touch is lost and all pain is felt, no hand to hold, no hand.
Why, my Father, endure this stench of time? -- your Spirit knows.
How long, O Lord, Thy haste?