Against introspection

Memorial Episcopal Church publishes a series of Lenten meditations by members of the parish. I was invited to contribute this year but, distracted and preoccupied by other matters, missed the deadline. Now, to stop ruminations from rolling around in my head, I offer them to you.

In Lent we are invited, encouraged, and exhorted to engage in self-examination, which is a healthy enough thing to do, but which can easily lead us astray.

In introspection we may wind up dwelling on the pains of the past: the injuries we have done to others, the wounds we have suffered that still ache, the actions we have failed to take, and the defects of our character that stubbornly persist throughout our lifetimes. Introspection can mire us, and the more we reflect on our failures, our hurts, and our limitations, the less we may be able to extricate ourselves, the more we may feel powerless.

I'd like to suggest that after a little self-examination, it might be better to consider actions.

For many people, the main action in Lent is to give something up: red meat, liquor, desserts, caffeine, cigars, whatnot. How about, instead, giving up something from the past that is beyond remedy? Those love letters from a failed romance? Recycle them into pulp. The same with that letter of rejection for a job you sought. Mark something over and done with in your mind, and rid yourself of the physical manifestation.

Another action is to make something right. Make an apology to that person you injured. You may not be forgiven. Or give up on the resentment of someone who injured you.

Cast your mind on what you might yet do instead of what you have done or failed to do. As Paul Writes to the Philippians, "forgetting what is behind me, and reaching out for that which lies ahead, I press towards the goal."

Some of this might be good for us corporately as well. As much as we honor our history and our identity as a denomination, a diocese, or a parish, it is better to live in the present and press toward the future than to live in the past. Reflecting too much on our past glories that have faded, or focusing on past failures and resentments, will not get us where we wish to go.

An explanation for Mr. Morrow

Both Clark Elder Morrow and Robert Hartwell Fiske have objected to my comments on Mr. Morrow’s writing about the Oxford English Dictionary, complaining that I have failed to give Mr. Morrow’s texts full consideration. I had endeavored to spare you, my readers, such an examination, but the worthy gentlemen are entitled to get what they have asked for.

Therefore I will go over Mr. Morrow’s original article on the OED’s “slide into stark irrelevancy,” demonstrating in some detail that it is a tissue of inanities wrapped in rodomontade.

A major deficiency comes to the fore immediately as Mr. Morrow goes on about the “once-august and once-respected tsar of all dictionaries” having including the heart symbol under the entry for love. There is much huffing and puffing,* and what you may take for ponderous waggery, about how this will help to “precipitate the Apocalypse of St. John.” 

Actually, as the linguist Dennis Baron patiently pointed out, the OED has not included the heart symbol; neither has it listed such a meaning in the love entry. It has added to the entry on heart as a verb, indicating that that sense is sometimes represented by the symbol. Given Mr. Morrow’s windbaggery about precision of meaning, one might have expected better of him, and of Mr. Fiske for reproducing this error in his Dictionary of Unendurable English.

Putting that bone aside, Mr. Morrow proceeds to chew on some initialisms: “LOL and OMG are included now, of course, Not words, you say? Doesn’t matter. Any burp, any eructation, any sound-producing escape of noxious fumes from a human being. …” Say, you don’t mind, do you, if I begin to abbreviate some of the repetitive blowhard rhetoric, do you? Professor Baron points out that the inclusion of initialisms in dictionaries is not a novelty. And unless Mr. Morrow uses ante meridiem and post meridiem instead of a.m. and p.m. with times, he should know this.

He also deplores the inclusion of phrases, such as tinfoil-hat-wearing (and I will not speculate on why that particular one is a burr under his saddle). I wish that he had expanded on this (not a wish I frequently voiced while reading the article), because all of the dictionaries I’m familiar with include phrases.

There is some extended carrying-on about slang and ephemeral phrases. I’ll move to the punch line: “Does the OED really want to produce a fifty-volume set (and it will be fifty volumes if it continues in its mad lust for passing verbal hiccups), the vast majority of whose terms will have to be marked Obs. In a relatively brief time?” I begin to wonder how much time, if any, Mr. Morrow himself has spent in these sacred precincts. The OED is a dictionary on historical principles, beginning each entry with the oldest meaning to be found. Virtually every page has an entry with some archaic and obsolete meaning.

Let me skip to the peroration: “The inclusion of a heart symbol [not actually there, remember?] in the OED renders the entire enterprise suspect, in my view, and wassup and LOL nestling in its pages mean that I will return (for all my lexical explanations) to the 1913 edition of Noah Webster’s masterpiece.” 

Now all begins clear. After all this tick-tocking between tosh and bosh, we see the point. Mr. Morrow dislikes not only the language of the twenty-first century, but also that of the twentieth. And the Oxford lexicographers have had the temerity to include in a dictionary words that he does not like, without consulting him. This galls him.

The point of a dictionary is to provide meanings for terms, and I expect that many current readers and writers appreciate a resource that sets out to explain the meaning of language they encounter that is unfamiliar. Not to speak of how much future readers and writers may need it to understand the writings of this age.  

But for Mr. Morrow, that is not the point. The point is that a dictionary should exercise Authority, should pass judgment on what words are acceptable for the language, showing arrivistes to the door. As I concluded previously, he complains about the OED for not doing what it does not set out to do.

I suggested originally that Mr. Morrow might be a coxcomb. Here’s a meaning from Dr. Johnson’s dictionary: “a superficial pretender to knowledge or accomplishments.” I leave it to you, gentle reader, to judge my surmise.

*Viz., “So it is now undeniable that there is no phrase, no adjectival compound, no tattoo symbol, no random smudge on a page or a pair of pants anywhere in the world, that the editors of the OED will not enshrine in its pages—electronic and otherwise. It does not matter how far the term in question may lay [oh, sic] from mainstream usage—it doesn’t matter how completely unheard-of the word or mark or scrawl may be—it does not matter how asinine or silly or childish or contemptible the pictogram or smear may be—it matters only that some sort of consensus emerges among the geeky gurus of the OED as to its inclusion, and the mark or scratching or happy face is hallowed forever in some corner of the estimable tome.”

Mind you, the OED, however estimable, is neither a shrine nor a hallowed place nor a repository of sacred scripture, but a dictionary, a place to which people resort to find the meanings of words they do not know. And, of course, I have to remind you, the odious symbol that gave rise to this chivvying is not actually included. 

New Sun blog site

The version of You Don’t Say that operates at baltimoresun.com has relocated to a new Web address and new software. You will be able to find it at http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/language-blog/, where the first post, “Dunce English,” is already up.

I hope to see you there. 

For the best of us

Twenty-nine years

Today is the twenty-ninth anniversary of my marriage to Kathleen Capcara, whom you see above with me in a 2009 photograph at the celebration of the 150th anniversary of Trinity Episcopal Church in Towson, where she works as director of evangelism and formation. The word of the week over at Baltimoresun.com is vicissitudes, and she has stood by me through many vicissitudes. Or rather, we have stood together. And continue to stand.

Consumer note

Seriously myopic—I’m talking about vision, not thinking, thank you—since childhood, I’ve been wearing thick eyeglasses for fifty years. I know some of the lines of letters on the eye charts by heart. There have been occasional difficulties with prescription lenses, like the time the ophthalmologist reversed the numbers for the correction of my astigmatism, but nothing previously like my experience this year.

I went to Doctors Visionworks in Towson Town Center this spring for an eye examination and new glasses. I need two sets of bifocals, one with the distance and close focus for ordinary use, one with computer-distance and close focus for editing. (I once tried trifocals, which drove me nuts, continually bobbing my head trying to get the range.)

The optometrist prescribed lenses, which, because of my extreme nearsightedness, take some time to prepare. I called when they were due and was told that the lab had made a mistake and had to do them over. So I waited.

I finally collected the glasses, which seemed to be OK. You may know that it takes a little time to adjust to new lenses, and I began to feel that something was not quite right. I finally determined that the distance focus through the left lens was sharp but the focus through the right lens was slightly blurry.

I went back to Doctors Visionworks, which guarantees that it will make good. I was examined by a different optometrist, who wrote a slightly different prescription, and they sent out for new lenses without any difficulty.

When I called about the new glasses, the person who answered was a little stiff with me. They would be ready on the date on the order (which I had not seen) and not before.

In fact, they were delayed for an additional week because the lab had once more made a mistake and had to do the lenses over again.

Now I have them, and have discovered that one pair was so shoddily fitted that the right lens tends to pop out of the frame. I could take it back—I suppose they would still be willing to make good—but God knows how long their lab would take and what would be wrong after that.

So I’m saving up another few hundred dollars so that I can see an ophthalmologist and go to a competent optician. I don’t intend to have any further commerce with Doctors Visionworks, and now, I think, neither will you. 

Unashamed Anglicanism

Leafing through a folder of old documents, I came across the certificate of my confirmation and realized that I have been an Episcopalian for just over thirty-five years. And you may ask, why?

Fair question. In three and a half decades I have endured so many low-grade, cliché-ridden sermons and winced at so much defective choral and solo singing that if there is anything to the Romish doctrine of Purgatory, my stay there should be seriously shortened.

There is also no particular social advantage anymore to Episcopalianism, which, paradoxically, is a good thing for the church. Now that it is no longer a place to be seen, except in certain pockets, or to make business contacts, it draws a much smaller crowd but people who actually want to be there.

I was drawn to the Episcopal Church for its orderliness and dignity. The liturgical calendar imposes a pattern and rhythm on the passage of time, and the lectionary imposes at least a theoretical limit on the waywardness of preachers, who usually feel compelled to talk about something other than baseball.

I am impressed that Anglicanism indulges intelligence—that you are allowed to  believe in evolution and geology and Copernican cosmology and the biblical scholarship of the past two and a half centuries.  

I love organ music and Anglican chant, and an Anglican church is pretty much the only place you can hear them regularly. I’m moved by the grace and eloquence of the Book of Common Prayer, which has its own music in prose.

I find the vestments and ceremonials, particularly the use of incense, to add to the weight and dignity of the liturgy. (Oh yes, I know perfectly well that the whole thing can get stale and arid, but I have seen it when it wasn’t.)

I am confronted by my own limitations and failings and forced to see them clearly, while being comforted that I am not entirely defined by them and can hope to rise above them.

And—here is where some of you may part company with me—I like what the Episcopal Church stands for.

In my parish, Memorial Episcopal in Baltimore’s Bolton Hill, the late Barney Farnham came in as rector forty-two years ago and announced that Memorial would be an open congregation. That meant that black people were welcome to attend.

I became an Episcopalian at the time that the denomination discovered that women are fully human and decided to ordain them. It subsequently discovered that they could be bishops too.

I am now an Episcopalian at a time when gay people need not conceal who they are, but can also become priests and bishops. And I have attended blessings, in church, of their unions.

Some of this, perhaps much of this, draws frowns from the schismatics who have broken away from the Episcopal Church, and I have no doubt that it is formally condemned by religious authorities such as the Reverend Doctor R. Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville.

I am content for them to pronounce their judgments on what I believe and practice, waiting as I am for the ultimate Judgment and remembering that the Founder never expressed much enthusiasm for religious authorities.

... and it keeps on ticking

Just a reminder that You Don't Say continues in its second life at baltimoresun.com.

Also on baltimoresun.com, you can see the resumption of my video jokes, posted on alternate Mondays.

And a new feature, In a Word, presents a new vocabulary word every Monday. Here is a gallery of entries.

Remember, remember, second September

I posted earlier today on the Sun blog explaining why this date is memorable for more than the Japanese surrender in 1945: 

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog/2010/09/a_day_for_the_books.html

August update

Unfortunately, the Parkside is no more. Kathleen and I happened to eat there the night before it shut down and enjoyed a dish of J.P.'s creation, spicy artichoke poppers. Sad.

Perhaps less sadly, baltimoresun.com is featuring a "Joke of the Week" every Monday, and I am telling it on alternate weeks. Here is a link to the video for this week's offering, "The Cannibal Reporters":

http://www.baltimoresun.com/videobeta/?watchId=0a97fa71-78e4-4fae-ac33-cd6907f25d1a

And if you have not yet been reading this blog in its return to baltimoresun.com, please come on over:

http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/mcintyre/blog/