British > foreign translator

[Father Bill]

As a subsequent, deeper, and probably more useful thought than my earlier post in this thread, it occurs to me that when I was a youngster, a "streak" was a smudge on a window or a long light moving through the night sky. As a young adult, the same word signified someone running naked across a stage or for example, through a basketball court. Now as I approach retirement for the second time in my life, I discover that it again means a smudge on a window, or a fast moving item.

Similarly, without inviting discussions of sexuality, the word "gay" has undergone a major redefinition in my life time, and again, without inviting religious discussion, I've discovered that the word "believing" has moved over the last couple of centuries from "trusting" to "accepting the factuality" of someone or something - a tiny but critically important distinction in my current field of theological endeavour.

There are many words whose meanings change over time as well as place, and we may also occasionally miscue between generations as well as continents. Even public figures change their import and value. I was a teenager in the 60s. (Yes, I'm freely dating myself.) As a young teacher in the 70s I was amused and shocked when one of my eleven-year-old students asked me with great excitement whether I knew that Paul McCartney had played in another band before "Wings."

Each generation establishes its own norms and understanding of those norms. Things I consider horrible and egregious such as today's invasions of privacy well beyond electronic spy-snooping are considered normal by teens and twenty-somethings. I'm so grateful to have lived a mostly boring life - boring to those who might want to scrape something up on me. Similarly, it's a blessing to have a plain name. Go ahead: do an Internet search for "Bill White." You may have a hard time sussing out the few listings that are mine, and many of you have come to know me well enough.

As a former English teacher, I remember teaching at a French Immersion school back somewhere around 1990 give or take some. That year two interesting events coincided, and were informative by their co-incidence. As I remember it, the Academie Francaise published their complete dictionary of the French language in four volumes. The same year, Oxford re-issued the Complete Oxford Dictionary in... forty volumes. I have a great love of both French (which I speak poorly) and English (which I daily try to speak better) but regardless of the size of print, page, margin, or bindings, the fact remains that English is one of the world's largest languages. My more perfectly bilingual colleagues at the time agreed with me that compared to French, the vocabulary of the English language is massive. That allows for variations and nuance that we cannot begin to imagine, and from whose errors we must be continually on the defense.

An instructive exercise! Thanks for reminding us that dictionaries are not necessarily either international nor timeless.

Here endeth the lesson!

Bill+