I am out of the office 7/27 through Monday 8/8, but I'll reply to your message after I return.
--
Beth Young
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~byoung
>>> ATEG 08/01/05 12:53 >>>
I'm sure you are all tired of this story by now, but this version appeared in my mail today.
From: "Wordsmith" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: A.Word.A.Day--gadarene
Date: Monday, August 01, 2005 5:41 AM
gadarene (GAD-uh-reen) noun
A headlong rush.
[After the town of Gadara in a biblical story where two demon-possessed
men ask Christ to send them into a herd of swine. They dash into the
herd and all the animals rush violently over a cliff.]
"Research from Greenwich Associates has identified a Gadarene rush
by Japanese financial institutions into hedge funds."
John Plender; Punting, Not Hedging; Financial Times (London, UK);
Sep 27, 2004.
In the 1920s, while barring the teaching of foreign languages, Texas
governor Miriam "Ma" Ferguson picked up a Bible and famously declared,
"If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for Texas."
The governor could be excused for not knowing that what she held in her
hand was a translation, but not for mixing state and religion. But here
we'll focus on the former.
If anything, she unknowingly presented an argument for better teaching of
history and geography. There was no language called English at the time of
Christ, nor was the Bible written in English. The books making up the text
of the Bible were written in various languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek).
So much for mandating monolingualism!
The text of the Bible encompasses a variety of genres: prose and poetry,
letters and songs, acrostic and puns, prophecy and beyond. The Bible is
also a rich source of metaphors many of which have become part of the
language. This week we've picked five such biblical allusions.
-Anu Garg
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Sponsored by:
Oxford University Press: Special offer for AWAD subscribers - 25% off the
New Oxford American Dictionary. Visit http://www.oup.com/us/noadscholars
----- Original Message -----
From: crg
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 10:48 AM
Subject: Jesus was an English speaker!
This message was just posted on the Shakespeare list:
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 16.0984 Tuesday, 24 May 2005
Let me quickly reply to Steve Roth's sigh, when he writes:
>A friend who occasionally attends
>Washington State legislature committee meetings in Olympia reported to >me the follow statement by a legislator during a discussion of bilingual
>education:
>
>"Well if the English language is good enough for the Lord Jesus Christ, it's good enough for me."
As a folklorist, I can report that this story has been going around at least since the sixties (when I saw it in the Indianapolis Star, in the letters to the editor column), and appears regularly in such columns and other such venues, attributed to many different speakers. It may be that more than one writer or speaker actually says this, but it is still a contemporary legend and has questionable factual basis when reported second-hand.
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