UNCHURCH ME, YOU CAD

Some nice young ladies have started the Church of Brunch, which advertises:

Everything you want from a church, without the religion. Join us for non-god-centered Sunday ceremony. All philosophies welcome, leave your dogma at the door. Services followed by potluck vegan brunch. Believers, atheists welcome. Enjoy singing, fellowship, and brunch!

It seems they kind of missed going to church and the warm fuzzy feelings they got there when they were kids, you know, feeling virtuous and clean with a group of nice friendly people. A party without the drinks (although I always thought brunch implied Bloody Marys), burgers, and pesky beliefs. Philosophies are OK but not dogma, which means firmly held belief in a truth. Philosophy implies intellect, not experiential faith (and faith does not mean the same thing as belief). Anyway, as long as you don't really believe anything, you're cool.

They sing too. Here are some of the songs they scheduled this summer:

Free to Be You and Me

Summer in the City

Sunshine Superman

Folsom Prison Blues

Favorites from the children of the boomers. Yes, I bought the Free to Be You and Me album when my kids were little, but also, definitely and maybe even dogmatically, Johnny Cash, who went to a real church. (In fact I saw him perform live twice, once with wife June Carter in a great big church called The Cathedral of Tomorrow.)

An etymological side trip is called for here: The word church and kirk and other old words come from the Greek kyriako`n, meaning the Lord's house, from kyriako`s, meaning concerning a master or lord, from ky^ros, meaning power, none of which are quite fully expressed in brunch or pop songs, and all of which are quite the reverse of some of their chat topics such as the Museum of Ephemerata. Real church is about what is not ephemeral. No doubt these non-church ladies would find concepts of "lord" and "power" distasteful.

The Church of Brunch reminds me of the dry clubs for recovering alcoholics, that have a sort of barroom atmosphere for people who miss the bars but can't handle the alcohol. The Church of Brunch is church lite to the point of Trivial Pursuit. Reminds me also of these lines from the Yeats poem, "Slouching towards Bethlehem":

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

CREDIBLE

Stephen Cox wrote about what he calls "vague intensifiers" ("Word Watch", Liberty, p. 8, June 2006) like incredible, amazing, and so on, his point being that people use them interchangeably so they become meaningless filler, rather than adding more specific meaning. They also use them incorrectly. I agree with him, but not with one of his examples. He quoted someone who described a trip to Lake Tahoe as incredible, and Emerald Bay as incredible. Cox wrote, "Maybe if I took a trip up to Tahoe I would see something that staggered my own imagination, something I saw but could not believe. It might be a parking lot for flying saucers." Maybe he couldn't believe in flying saucers, but he ought to believe in parking lots for flying saucers. There used to be a movie theater in Akron, Ohio, whose owner supposedly kept a very large parking lot by the theater empty in the expectation that saucers might land someday. So yeah, a parking lot for flying saucers is completely credible.

GRUELING

I was wondering if there's any connection between gruel (a thin porridge) and grueling (hard labor). Grueling does not turn up any etymology in my usual online dictionaries, but there must be a relation. Maybe if you do very hard work you feel pulverized into thin oats or groats?

HOW LITERATURE GETS MADE

Supposedly writer Mickey Spillane always had the heroes of his books eat in diners because he couldn't always remember how to spell restaurant. I doubt that. Writers always have their little tricks. He could have taped the word up by his typewriter. His heroes were just diner kind of guys.

PASSERBYS

Someone on TV said passerbys, meaning passersby. Passer is still strong enough that the plural must be formed there, in the middle, rather than at the end of the word. This isn't a universal rule, of course. For instance, you wouldn't pluralize flyover as flysover. (Did you know flyover is the British word for what we call an overpass?)

DO TELL

>>> Large yellow street sign: PEDESTRIANS USING ROADWAY. This warns non-pedestrians, of course, that people might be crossing the road or walking on the edge of the road, but it creates an image of people walking down the middle of the traffic lane. Why is a sign required? Eventually I expect to see traffic signs saying 'VEHICLES USING ROADWAY" or "SOMETHING MIGHT HAPPEN!"

>>> Fred and I were shopping for one of those skinny TVs when he found this warning label on the back of a TV: "REAR: This side faces the rear." That's for all those consumers who buy TVs and set them up backwards and then wonder why they're not getting a good picture. And then perhaps sue the manufacturer. Long ago I read a children's story about a family that bought a piano and had it set up in front of a window. But the delivery men set it up backwards, so the young lady of the house sat on the porch and played it through a window. Everyone was happy until winter made it too cold to play. Helpful neighbors suggested that they "turn the piano 'round" but they couldn't because it was a square piano!

>>> Somewhere there's "a song from a woman's standpoint of view." What about her sitpoint of view? I tend to have more sitpoints than standpoints.

>>> A TV movie blurb said: "A singer infatuates a teenage photographer." While this is correct, so says the dictionary, I have never heard "infatuate" used in this form. People are always infatuated (made foolish by love), but I've never heard or read this active, transitive verb form. Have you?

DIVISIVE

We pronounce divisive with a long i after the v (check the sound link). But I've heard that as a short i also ~ di-vissive. I thought that might be a British pronunciation, but checking online (on an interesting site called fonetiks.org) it seems not to be. That pronunciation would stem from the word division rather than divide so either pronunciation seems logical. But as we know, logical isn't always correct.

BROWNED-OFF

Apparently I didn't make it clear in the last PO that browning the barrel of a musket is not what gave the Brown Bess its nickname. Herb H. wrote:

I want to make sure some objection is raised to the idea of soldiers dulling their muskets and thereby giving them the name "Brown Bess." It took me a day or two to recover from the shock of the suggestion, though. In a lifetime of familiarity with gun lore, I've never heard that suggestion. And now I find no reference to it, even on the internet ~ where one can usually find anything.

Herb sent a corrective web site about muskets, which is actually another page from the same site I referred to. The Henderson article I linked to last week certainly did not say that the name "Brown Bess" referred to the browned rifles, and I didn't say it either. The guns' nickname preceded the practice of browning the metal, and most likely referred to the beautiful walnut stock. (But why "Bess"?)

Objection raised, objection met.

ONE-OFF

I must say a word of sorrow about the death of Steve Irwin, the Australian Crocodile Hunter you've seen on TV. He was a good man, brave, funny, and much too young to go.

On TV, John Howard, the Australian prime minister, called him one-off, a British slang term meaning "one of a kind." He was.

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