pecunium

That caught me at a difficult moment in the novel I'm translating. The protagonist was just getting a personal concert - and then was shot at by The Bad Guyz, who rolled in on a tank.

I took a net break, and was caught full-on with that story.

Uplifting, yes. Despite the punnishness involved in that particular characterization of it. It's also part of what I've come to see as the "Washington nice", the thing that makes living in rural WA a particular pleasure. People seem to go the extra mile. Or three. Anyhow, I've printed it out and will bring it to my 92-year old friend, who used to LOVE baseball (no softball for Ruth!) when she was just a ten year old redhead...

Thanks for posting it.

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Question (tangiental): how fluent is your hebrew?

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It's native level. I lived in Israel from age four to age thirty-four and got most of my education in Hebrew.

Simultaneously, I spoke English at home, and kept up with reading through special classes and a single-minded obsession with being American.

I've published in both languages - journalism, poetry, and translations (both how-to and novels). The only thing I've ever done in Hebrew that I haven't (yet) done in English is publish books. (Two books. About dog care.)

If you have any Hebrew questions you want to ask - I'm your man.

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Funny looking man. :)

So, (I asked this at ML, but then the crash came).

I don't know how to spell it in Hebrew, so I can't throw you the specific word; but I have a best guess. I need to ask this in parts, so if you can answer the one bit, and then the next, and then the last, that would help.

1: How does Hebrew define cud (as in what cows chew).

2: Is the word gerah cud?

3: Does it include the meaning of by anus, to saw-catch-chew-destroy.

Thanks.

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Drawing on the fine etymological dictionary by Avraham Even Shoshan, the 1992 edition:

2. The word is indeed gerah (which is either גרה if you use diacritics for vowels, or גירה if you choose the standard, vowelless orthography.)

1. The phrase for chewing cud (to chew cud) is lehaalot gerah (literally, to bring up the gerah). The specific word for cud may have some etymological relationship to the word for a single grain (garger or gar'in - גרגר, גרעין, and to agora אגורה, which is a small-denomination coin). There is also an Accadian relationship (the word in Accadian is Giru.) It refers to anything that you've brought beyond your teeth and is still in your mouth (Even Shoshan says that it could be used to refer to food that is stuck in your teeth).

Interestingly, there is another etymology, which relates to the upper torso: it is also called gera, and is related to garon, the neck (the inside of the neck. The outside is tzavar).

3. Modern Hebrew does not relate cud-chewing to anything done by anus, nor to saw-catch-chew-destroy. However, the word for provoking or challenging someone is hitgara (התגרה) (years of reading about graylag geese come crashing to the fore... ...they use neck motions for warning as well as for courtship). Basically, the word for cud relates to various words for aggression, so that catches the "destroy" word.

And I'm not *that* funny looking... ...even for a man.

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Well, I guess that depends on what you're wearing, but I suspect that in clothing which reveals your shape...

:)

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If you don't mind, I am going to lift this to Boing-Boing.

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Go right ahead. I found it fascinating - I hadn't known about any of the sideline items.

Sorry I missed the question on ML! I find it difficult to follow the open threads - when work gets busy, I lose my place and tend to give up. How do you follow up on reading, anyhow?

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Brute force and too much time on ML.

To be fair, I do read quickly. I do a lot of work on the computer (since I went to digital photography) and so I check every too often; use the trick of clicking the bottom comment in the thread when I'm done, and then just look upstream in the "last 100 comments" link.

Even at that, I lose comments if I go more than about 12 hours,and there are threads I just stop reading (Little Brother, for example).

Open threads took me awhile to get the hang of, but they are probably my favorite discussions nowadays, because each of them grows in it's own way, even when ideas carry from one to the next.

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My method has been to bookmark the latest comment I read in threads of interest, and return and read from there. (I use bookmark folders in the menu bar of Firefox).

But even so, I end up spending easily 1/3 or my online reading time at ML (1600 wpm notwithstanding; there are many threads, and each thread that I feel is active gets linked as above). I wish there were technology that made keeping my place easier... easier than what I'm using.

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Why do you ask?

I'm guessing that you're asking because you're arguing with creationists, and wish to point out that the Bible claims that rabbits and hyraxes chew their cud, whereas in fact they don't.

The counterclaim is that the phrase l'ha'alot gerah, used in the Bible, refers not just to chewing cud of the sort that ungulates do, but also to the sort of regurgitating and re-chewing that rabbits do.

Unfortunately, this is a hard question to answer. The Bible, even if written by God, was still written in a human language, and one that's 2000+ years old. If people at the time didn't know about the distinction, there isn't going to be a word for the distinction for God to use. Now perhaps God could have made up a word, but even if the Bible is still true and relevant today, it needed to be comprehensible to the people to whom it was given, 2000+ years ago, or else it never would have made it to today.

Then of course there is the claim in the Bible that insects walk on four legs. I have always understood this as a figure of speech meaning that they walk in a horizontal position, rather than upright; on the grounds that even if the Bible was written by humans, any idiot can count the legs on an ant. Of course, that's a non-literal reading, right there.

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Well, yes, and no; which is to say it's a creo, and that rabbits don't work that way.

Because rabbits, hyrax and guinea pigs don't regurgitate, they collect some fecal matter into a cecal ouch (just off the colon, near the anus) and eat it as it passes.

So, it seems, at leas one concordance therefore defines "cud" as something "sawn from the anus". Talking with some talmudic types the explanation was, "the people who wrote that up, didn't really understand what they were seeing."

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Okay; what I know about rabbits I learned from Watership Down so I'm not surprised if I misunderstood the details.

The facts of the case are still basically the same, though: Whoever wrote the Bible claimed that both cows and rabbits chew their cud. Does this mean that 1) they didn't know about the distinction, or 2) perhaps the same phrase was used for both processes, or 3)someone who did know about the distinction was writing for an audience of people who didn't, and didn't want to confuse them.

I think 2 or 3 or some combination thereof is possible.

However, I'm confused why someone would want to define "cud" as something "sawn from the anus." All that gets you is that rabbits chew their cud but cows don't.

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I wasn't completely clear. This concordance/explanatory dictionary says that cud is both regurgitus, and excreta.

Thus, you see, both cows and rabbits do "chew the cud," and the inerrancy of the bible is retained.

Save that he says he doesn't believe the bible to be inerrant; except when it is.

It's a very frustrating conversation; if you are looking for reasoned debate. It has, however, been very good for practicing my explanatory powers.

I can point you to it, should you wish to read along at home; some really good writing was done.

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Sure, why not.

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It's <http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/23/against-ben-steins-w.html>Against Ben Stein's wishes, lizards rapidly evolve after introduction to island on Boing-Boing.

It's long, but looking at the most recent comment (702) mostly dead, as the creationist seems to have quit the field.

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OK, I skimmed it. Here are my miscellaneous thoughts:

It seems that the creationist was basically saying some combination of 2 and 3 already, but what I don't understand is if you're willing to grant some scientific incompletenesses in the text because of the original audience, why not in the creation story, too? But that's been gone over I suppose, even if not satisfactorily answered.

The book that I would look at for definitions of Biblical words is the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon, which is old. I studied Semitic linguistics in university and we routinely used books a hundred years old or so; a lot of the best work was being done in the field at that time, stuff that hasn't been superseded although some improvements in knowledge have been made. It's only in the last five years or so that a Talmudic dictionary that could replace the Jastrow has been released, for instance.

In any case, this is what the Brown-Driver-Briggs has to say: grr drag, drag away. It cites a use in Kings as meaning "sawn with the saw" which is probably where Strong is getting the "sawn" part of "sawn from the anus." I would make a suggestion as to where he's getting the "anus" part, but it's kind of obvious.

gerah cud, only in legislation of clean and unclean animals. There's a suggestion that it's related to an Arabic word, jirrah and that it's an onomatopoeia for chewing.

There's more, but it occurs to me that if "l'ha'alot gerah" means "to bring up something that is chewed," the obvious place where this falls apart in rabbits is not in the "gerah" part but in the "l'ha'alot" part.

Anyway.

I do think that in real life people sometimes speak, or write, literally, and sometimes less-than-literally, and other people have to make judgments about which is which all the time, and it really is a sort of you-know-it-when-you-see-it kind of thing, so I'm not sure why this would not apply to the Bible as well. Of course, people also make incorrect judgments about this sort of thing all the time, and that would also apply to the Bible.

You said you believe in the God of Abraham and Moses, in re: arguing with God. How do you feel about the God of Job? Just curious. I can see the God of Job being used as an argument against either science or creationism, but He's pretty arrogant either way.

Also, the creationist is wrong about the bit about a thousand years being like a single day to God being in the New Testament, unless the Psalms are in the New Testament. Which they're not. Not that it really matters to this argument either way.

Commenting here to avoid commenting there.

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I believe in the God of Job, I just don't like Him much. He's a theodicy problem, not a literalist problem.

As to my slam at Strong, it was cheap, and mostly because the problem with strong isn't so much that the lexicons of 100 years ago are bad, but that the biblical thinking has changed a lot, and the problem of literalistic rectification was/is a big problem with the Christian works of the time.

Evidence is wrong about a lot of things; not least that he uses the same phrase to show the "literal" nature of the bible being scientifically correct, and then using it to show that large parts are purely poetic.

In his mind there are multitudes.

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This story helpfully gave me the best response I could hope for to my uncle, who recommended that I read Chris Hedges' book War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning. Obviously, I find the title hard to swallow; I see war as an abhorrent necessity - pretty much by the doctrines of just war promoted over the years by most international organizations, including churches.

War is sometimes necessary, and when engaged in - surely it is meaningful. But it is only one of the forces that bestows meaning. Every person present on that field (or witness to it via the net) has had meaning injected into their life now, more meaning than they had before.

I hope my uncle understands.

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That title pisses me off. I can't do more than look at the back-flap, because I think he's full of shit.

While it's going on, war is meaninful, and those who interact with it are affected by it, but that's the case with any endeavor, so the title is tautological, and the presentation seems to be evil.

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I would have thought so except for the identity of the person who recommended it (he was a lawyer in the U.S. Marines) and the fact that I've heard Hedges speak (online interviews) and seen some other things he's written. He tends to make sense.

But the truth is that I can't get beyond that title, either. The book is waiting for a moment when I can look at it and NOT get mad.

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I skimmed some passages, they didn't help me in my assessment.

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vanmojo.livejournal.com

You know, I saw the video of this, and had a similar reaction. In a day and age when many of our sports seem to be so much about pure conflict, money, thuggery, and the whole pro-patria jingoist zeitgeist, this was a moment of purity and reaffirmed everything I love about baseball (yeah, I know, it's softball, but it's really just baseball with an extra infielder and different ball).

It's moments like that which remind me why I believe baseball is really the sport that reflects our national character...

mojo sends

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I commented to my housemate that this was something which was pretty much and, "only in baseball" thing. I'm hard pressed to think of another game (which is to say I'm including rounders, and softball, etc.) which allows for this sort of demonstration of comaradarie across teams.

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patgreene.livejournal.com

Maybe because the home run is such a weird hybrid: at one level, once it is hit, it is over -- the other team can neither attack the ball nor the player. One the other hand, it is not yet done until the player (or substitute) has rounded all the bases and touched each one. It does not matter how slowly and gimpily the player rounds the bases (Kirk Gibson in the '88 Series is proof of that), just that s/he does.

I can't think of anything in football (any type), basketball, or hockey like that. Free throws and penalty kicks come closest, I guess, but their outcome is far from determined.

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ckd

I think it's a reflection of the "no clock" nature of the game. Baseball is over when it's over, and only then; no shot clock, no play clock, no two-minute warning.

(I don't know enough about cricket to say if there's an analogous play situation.)

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packbat.livejournal.com

Lovely story. :)

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don-fitch.livejournal.com

It's not clear to me that this necessarily has much of anything do with Sports, or with Baseball, other than the accident of it happening in this venue. I see it as being, almost entirely, a reaffirmation of the fact that young people have a remarkable capacity for being idealistic, good-hearted, fair, and generous.

(Those qualities aren't , of course, limited to the young, and their expression of them certainly owes much to adult/parental/teacher influences, but our culture seems to encourage adults to "outgrow" many things I think we'd do better to stick with.)

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vanmojo.livejournal.com

I think you are correct in that this is essentially a story about being good-hearted, fair and generous. It is just that as sports go, Baseball seems to afford the most opportunity to display those characteristics, and as this happened during a game, it was also a reflection of the character of the game and of those who play it.

Although I am an admittedly pro-baseball guy, just so I don't look like I'm trying to hide my bias.

mojo sends

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don-fitch.livejournal.com

And, For The Record (I didn't mention it): I'm somewhat biased against Organized and Team Sports in general (including baseball).

But I'll agree that baseball (at least at the highschool level, which this example was) seems to be more strongly influenced than most (soccer is Since My time, but might be similar, in the U.S.) by the benign aspects of having been played with friends since relatively early childhood.

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