Sunday, September 18, 2011
Me no speak-ah Christianese-ah
Aunt Haley (Haley's Halo): Me no speak-ah Christianese-ah -- For once, miss Haley isn't writing from the anti-Christian, to say nothing of false-to-reality, perspective of "Game". And, she's making a criticism I often, with rolled eyes, think, but have never articulated.
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I have to giggle-- basically, this boils down to a dialect difference.
You know, that thing that's supposed to be cherished and enshrined if it's based on geography instead of beliefs.
That's certainly an entertaining way of looking at it.
Mind you, I grew up listening to that "dialect" ... and it has *always* irked me.
"Oh, Thelma Mae! I just blesses my heart that said 'Hello, BethAnne Lou' to me just now."
"Well, BethAnne Lou, God placed a burden on my heart that you really just needed to be blessed today!"
I recently finished reading three "space opera" type novels (bought at a bargain-basement discount store, to give you some idea of how well they sold), set about 11,000 years in the future (*) which contained some of this sort of silliness. Also, the silly man who wrote them foolishly assumed that well, of course, a future in which all men are Christians is going to be as socialistic as Star-Trek.
If it weren't that I like "space opera" and fantasy type novels (and that I dislike spending money for a book and then not reading it), I;d not have finished them. For example, had they been library books, the implicit socialism and the other silly utopianism would have been enough that I'd have returned them unread.
Near the end of the third novel, there was some half-serious grappling with serious questions.
(*) An 11,000 years in which all of humanity (**) are Christians ... and are "so Christian" that no one even sins anymore. The characters can parrot the line that "all men are sinners", but they don't understand it.
(**) except, as it turned out, a handful of rebels from the start of the period, who, their armed rebellion having failed, fled into Deep Space; and whose descendants never numbered more than 30 millions in all those years (for they were constantly at war with one another).
Mind you, I grew up listening to that "dialect" ... and it has *always* irked me.
To the best of my knowledge, you don't fetishize "diversity." If anything, you seem to have a big thing for nonflowery speech.
Me, I find public professions of belief to be sort of like public displays of affection-- most of them seem to be more about who is observing than the one (or One) supposedly adored.
(heh, my captcha: "conversn")
"Me, I find public professions of belief to be sort of like public displays of affection-- most of them seem to be more about who is observing than the one (or One) supposedly adored."
I agree, and especially about the public displays of affection.
... public displays of affection --I mean the sort of thing that prompts others to say (or to wish that *someone* would say) "Get a room" -- are not about the alleged affection, they are about the display. They are for the "benefit" of the (generally unwilling) on-lookers; they are about making a claim of ownership to the other person.
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