Lightly Esteemed Information

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Thomas Paine broadly penned the notion that what we obtain too cheaply we esteem too lightly. There are many things that modern people take for granted because they do not remember the pains taken by others to deliver us those conveniences, notions, and opportunities. Every year, someone does a story on things that the graduating class has always known as true or never known existed. It's been years, for example, since these kids grew up knowing what a 'walkman' was or having seen anyone actually use the cassette deck in their car, even if their car has one. There is another problem with information I wish to illustrate born of a conversation with a close friend. Words mean things, but they mean different things than we think they do.

Politicians regularly bandy about phrases about what the Founding Fathers meant. They trot out those quotes and those images to sell beer or guns or our participation in a rally at the foot of Lincoln's Memorial. None of those men really understand what the Founders meant. In order to understand the Founders, you begin with what they wrote, but it goes further than that. To understand what they wrote, you must understand how they used language.

People think that reading something someone said is the same as understanding what they meant. Two people can come away from the same experience or information received at the same time with completely different nuances, interpretations, and notions. For example, I read that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) added the word "Chillax" to its tome this year, a word I have actually never heard used although I have seen it typed on Facebook. It's slang, and it represents the problem the OED had (as detailed in The Professor and the Madman) in hammering down what words in English actually mean.

I myself represent a conundrum in the minds of those who converse with and experience things alongside me. Some friends tell me I 'sound like an old book' as a consequence of what I have read and assimilated into my own knowledge bank. In January 2009, I took a trip to Washington DC. One of the other people who went along asked me for a copy of my journal entries from the trip, with the promise that she would reciprocate. Although her promise went unfulfilled, it was very illustrative that although we saw and experienced those things together I placed completely different emphasis on events and experiences. Of course, I saw things through the prism of my interest and experience and according to how I chose to see certain other events. She was struck by things I recalled that she could not recall without my prompts to her memory. It would have been interesting to see how she recalled the same events, experiences, and conversations.

English is one of the most fluid and mercurial tongues of which I know. It changes, not only with advances in civilization, but also with every generation. There are words even I use that are from cartoons, video games, and instant messaging, which are themselves words foreign to the OED at the time of my own birth. English changes today almost as rapidly as the Post Office changes the price of a stamp.

Gutenburg did the world a great favor. He also did individuals a great disservice. When he made the Bible available without the benefit of education commensurate to understand the Bible, he introduced a problem into society. The Bible I read was commissioned by King James II, and contains phraseology and grammatical constructs common to Middle English but foreign to the modern vernacular. Even that Bible differs in meaning from the original, because the Bible was not written in English, and when it was first transcribed to another tongue other than that in which it was originally written (whether to Latin, Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, or any other language, even if it has a modern counterpart today), it lost its original meaning. Even existing languages in which it was written have changed, and if you do not speek Greek or Hebrew growing up, your mastery of that tongue is limited to the education and educator by which you gained whatever degree of fluency you enjoy.

Just as in order to understand Founder writ we need a dictionary from their time, modern diction and verbiage masks proper understanding of the Bible. Likewise, all these attempts to 'modernize' the Bible go the wrong way because many of the concepts expressed in English words of the time of James II are already changed from Old English, German, and very far from Greek and meant different things to Jesus, Elijah and Moses than to us.

Words matter. I regularly speak to people and have to ask them to define what they mean with certain phrases and notions, because I know that some have geographical, demographical, philosophical, and other nuances, depending on who says them, in what context they are said, and in what part of the nation or world those people learned those phrases. Some of them mean completely opposite things now. By and by, for example, used to mean 'immediately' whereas now it means, 'when I get around to it'.

In the era of immediate access to information, people treat too meanly their access to information. Just because someone says it doesn't make it true. Just because it's on the internet or wikipedia or my blog or in a book doesn't mean it means anything to anyone at all or the same things to everyone who reads it. Regularly, I criticize people who read the books of the Fox 5PMer without reading First Sources because everyone filters information through their own personal lens. In order to see things as another person, you must have the lens through which they saw the world. Since we can get ahold of data easily in a Yahoo search, we don't do research anymore. We esteem what we 'know' so lightly that we don't care how or why we came by that information or the motives of those by whom it disseminates to us.