English - The Mother Tongue

"Snowfall in Germany forces a lorry driver to attach snow chains to his tyres..."

Today I read this caption on BBC's website . . . . 'Lorry' and 'tyres' . . . language is interesting indeed.

In Flanders Fields

As I grow older, holidays mean different things. In some cases, they begin to mean something. Veteran's Day is one such holiday. This morning Dr. Peter Gentry began class by quoting this poem--and then lead the class in a prayer.


In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

— Lt.-Col. John McCrae

A Caution Related to Biblical Theology

"Illegitimate totality transfer," coined by Barr, is helpfully summarized by Osbourne in The Hermeneutical Spiral by the following sentences: "After going to so much trouble to find multitudinous meanings and uses for a word, it is hard for the scholar to select just one for the passage. The tendency is to read all or most of them (that is, to transfer the "totality" of the meanings) into the single passage. Such is the "illegitimate," for no one ever has in mind all or even several of the possible meanings for a term when using it in a particular context."

Barr, who does not summarize his terminology as clearly, applies the idea well in a caution related to biblical theology. Written in 1961, it is no less applicable today with the renewed interest in this discipline.

"We may briefly remark that this procedure ["illegitimate totality transfer"] has to be specially guarded against in the climate of present-day biblical theology, for this climate is very favourable to 'seeing the Bible as a whole' and rather hostile to the suggestion that something is meant in one place which is really unreconcilable with what is said in another . . . . There may be also some feeling that since Hebrew man or biblical man thought in totalities we should do that same as interpreters. But a moment's thought should indicate that the habit of thinking about God or man or sin as totalities is a different thing from obscuring the value of a word in a context by imposing upon it the totality of its uses. We may add that the small compass of the NT, both in literary bulk and in the duration of the period which produced it, adds a plausibility to the endeavour to take it as one piece, which could hardly be considered so likely for any literature of greater bulk and spread over a longer time."

--James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language, 218-19.