In The Beginning Was... The Word
Human beings talk. The other day I was told to 'stop rabbiting on'. Rabbits don't talk, so where did that verb come from? Was it something to do with the way their noses twitch? I looked it up, and it's Cockney rhyming slang - 'rabbit and pork' equals 'talk'!
My father often told us to scarper ('Scapa Flow' equals 'go') and wore his titfa ('tit for tat' equals 'hat') to work. I'm surprised that he never told us to stop rabbiting.
There are probably around a million English words and phrases, sourced from Latin and Greek, from Old High German, Norman French and Hindi, from American card games ('poker-faced', 'ace up your sleeve') and the sailing ships of Nelson's navy ('toeing the line', 'knowing the ropes'). And now the changing patterns of human 'talking' brings us the rich new use of old words - icon, window, mouse; and new ones - laptop, Google, apps.
All of which brings me to the Bible...
In the year that King James's Bible was published, Shakespeare began work on his last play, The Tempest. Shakespeare stretched the lexicon of English words to the very limit of one human brain, using a vocabulary of 30,000 words, including being the first recorded user of a couple of thousand or so ('accessible', 'accommodation'). The AV translators, seeking to turn ancient documents in ancient languages into poetic prose that would be read to, and increasingly by, the common people, used a vocabulary of a mere 8,000 English words, with phrases that have entered deep into this worldwide, common tongue ('good Samaritan', 'by the skin of your teeth', 'no peace for the wicked', 'salt of the earth', etc.).
And this is God's gift to us in creation - brains wired for speech - not just a practical, grunting kind of speech, but all the wonderful ways that human linguistic creativity has spoken in poetry and drama, in laws and ecstatic song, in lullabies and slang. In the beginning God... spoke; in the beginning was the Word. And the Bible, the AV and all its successors, has been translated again and again into the daily speech of millions of people in thousands of languages. It, too, is filled with song and parable, history and poetry, allegory and dream, prophecy, law and apocalyptic vision, biography and letters - God's word to the world.
Praise the Lord! Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.
Margaret Killingray
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.
