I was amused to see a post from earlier this week had made it into Tim Challies A La Carte feature. Let me rephrase that, I wasn’t amused the post was picked up; that happens sometimes and I don’t usually link back to it. I was specifically amused by the quote Tim used:

It is inevitable that you will, at times, be offended by someone at church. Stephen Kneale outlines the options that are available to you when, in his words, “somebody has been a colossal pillock.”

I enjoyed the out of context use of ‘colossal pillock’.

I then had a slight pang of conscience. Actually, not a pang of conscience – my conscience wasn’t remotely troubled – more a fear of judgement. Christians do love to get judgey and nothing quite sets them off as much as the use of a particular word over which they can get themselves in a lather. I was worried I might end up on the receiving end of some judgmental criticism because somebody didn’t like my very mild insult that was aimed at a fictional church-goer.¹

I imagine Tim quoted that bit because pillock is probably not common parlance in Canada. I suspect people in America would similarly not use it. For most people outside Britain, it is just a funny sounding, fairly gentle insult. Which is, in reality, what it is. Go ahead and google the definition, this is what you’ll find: ‘a stupid or silly person’. Some slightly longer definitions will tell you ‘it is generally used as a mild, somewhat old-fashioned insult’.

But I have come a cropper on this before. For it doesn’t often matter what a word actually means, oh no. Christians will go hunting for the source of the word. They will tell you the derivation of the term, what it originally meant and its original usage and insist we shouldn’t be saying it because of the origins. And when you look up the origin of the word pillock, apparently in 14th Century Scandinavian – because the term apparently originates in Sweden – it meant something a bit more rude. So that means I have been especially offensive, right?

Well, wrong. Wrong for several reasons. Several reasons that matter for how we speak today and, interestingly, some that would severely impact our bible study (yes, really!) Let me explain via my use of the word pillock.

First, and I don’t wish to shock anybody, but I don’t live in 14th Century Sweden. Nor, incidentally, do I speak Old Norse. I don’t even speak any modern Scandinavian languages. I live in 21st Century Britain and, like most UK people, I am embarrassingly unilingual. The only modern language I can speak is English and I am seeking to communicate in that language. Which at the most basic level means what the word meant in 14th Century Sweden is utterly irrelevant to what I mean or what we should hear today.

Second, let’s just pretend for the sake of argument the word didn’t originate in Sweden but was invented here in Britain and we made it up. And let’s also choose to believe that the origin of the word we made up was a bit rude. Does the origin of the word matter now? In short, not really. What matters now is what the word means today. This is and always has been how language has worked.

Let’s consider an obvious examples. When I use the word Thursday, what does a modern UK reader immediately think? Do they go, ‘ah yes, the day on which we worship Thor’? Of course not! They just think, ‘the fifth day of the week, the one after Wednesday’. There is no thought of Thor, thunder or worship. The origin of the word is now irrelevant to the meaning of the word today. Now, I suppose somebody might argue Thor’s Day was always a reference to a day so the meaning kind of holds. Maybe, though we cannot escape the the connotations are entirely different.

However, we have plenty of words that have entirely changed their meaning such that we would not employ them according to their original use; we recognise the origin militates against the modern meaning. We have words where the meaning is not completely inverse to the original, but it is significantly different such as disappoint, prestigious or gay. We even have words that originally meant the opposite to their modern usage such as awful or cloud (you can look them up yourself). This means the origin of a word isn’t particularly helpful in telling us what this word means today nor what connotations people will hear from it.

Third, let’s just say we ignore all of the above and some people want to insist that the word really is rude, whether based on origins or not. At some point, we have to take into account the intent of the one using it. I am reminded of the time an American friend came up to me and asked, point blank, ‘so, Steve, what exactly is the meaning of the word w***er?’² After wondering who had called him that and what he had done to warrant it, I explained. He didn’t mean anything offensive by it, I wasn’t offended by him, because it was an alien word to him. He wasn’t intending to be offensive so I must hear him as not being offensive because communication is the art of both making yourself understood and seeking to properly understand what is being said.

Interestingly, my friend was asking about that word w**ker assumed it meant something akin to our relatively gentle insult idiot. Which, it bears saying, in certain English subcultures and with the right tone of voice, it does! However, there are other contexts and cultural situations – particularly expressed via tone – where it is very insulting and rude. I explained that it is akin to the American phrase ‘jerk off’, which to British ears, is a meaningless phrase that isn’t remotely insulting because we don’t use the word. We only become aware of it from TV and film and, even then, don’t fully appreciate the full connotations. It’s like using the word twaddi or bombaclat. Ultimately meaningless noises or mild insults to English-speakers, but particularly rude swearwords in Punjabi and Patois.

Far too quickly, we like to jump to verses like ‘from the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks’. Which is obviously true because Jesus said it, but it doesn’t mean the person using the word we hear to be rude is intending to be rude. Their heart may well not be speaking what they believe to be rude. If you can tolerate bad language, there is a funny Burnistoun sketch that sends up this whole thing, particularly intercultural working class Scottish sensibilities and middle class English ones (you can watch it here – NB: do not click the link if you object to bleeped out swearing).

Now – and well done for sticking with me this far – let me explain why this kind of lexical origin-hunting judgmentalism would cause us problems when it comes to our bible reading. The aim of reading the bible is to understand what the writer is trying to communicate. We want to understand authorial intent because that is tightly bound up with what God wants to say. Which means we must understand the writer according to their genre of writing, the way they understand their words to be operating not based on where their words were derived from, and also not importing modern understandings that would be alien to the author. If we read the scriptures in the way we often want to judge the modern use of words based on their origin, we will inevitably misread them and misunderstand what they are saying.

Communication is a two-way street. The writer/speaker wants to make themselves understood as clearly as possible and the reader/listener wants to understand what is being communicated. Which means our aim is not to dissect every word of the text for its own sake. This would be closer to deconstructing the text which ends up making it devoid of context and, therefore, ultimate meaning. Rather, our task is to understand the words of the text on the terms in which those words are being employed by the author in their particular context so that we can grasp the author’s intended meaning rather than wrongly ascribing meaning to them or simply importing our own.

So, just as my use of pillock should properly be understood as a mild and inoffensive term because that is how I am employing it and how I think it is widely understood in modern usage, so we must work hard to understand the biblical writers on the terms in which they communicate. When we obsess over word-origin and take umbrage with particular words that were either innocently used or employed for a particular purpose, we ultimately miss the point the writer/speaker is making. I think this applies as much to our nit-picking over specific words as it does to a tendency in some to smooth over rougher words in scripture because they might offend modern sensibilities. In either case, we miss the meaning intended which ultimately doesn’t help us with our understanding.

1. For the record, at the time of writing, nobody had done so directly to me ↩︎
2. I asterisk the word because I don’t want to offend those inclined to be offended ↩︎