Shelburne faith column: The vocabulary challenge continues
New words keep popping up every day.
I’m sure that none of my grandparents would know what we mean by “Keurig.” When they spoke of a stream, they always meant a creek or river, but every Sunday churches now stream their worship. My Grandmother Key was deathly afraid of twisters (tornados). Instead of being of a howling storm, though, today “twister” means a ridiculous dance used on TV ads to sell everything from toothpicks to funerals.
Ditto for “flossing.” Until recent years, it always meant a dental procedure, but now it’s a dance — the gyration of the hips and swaying of the buttocks now used in a maddening number of TV ads.
The first time I heard “vaxxing” was during the Covid panic, when everybody from doctors to politicians were urging all of us get vaccinated.
Do you remember when “spoofing” meant a joke you played on a friend? In this age of digital dishonesty, it now means a way for scam artists to disguise their identity. Until recent months, though, I had never heard the term “smishing.” The CyberGuy website says it means “a scam in which a scammer will attempt to mimic a reputable company through a text message.”
“Hybrid” is another very old word that has been reborn in this decade. It no longer means a mule or a mongrel. It appears that the animal world also has lost the ages-old term “goats.” It no longer applies to the critters in my grandparents’ pasture, nor is it used to describe an unsuspecting scam victim. When I first heard star athletes being called GOATS, I thought they were being trashed. Now I know that it means Greatest Of All Time. Wow!
Somebody told me that every year Merriam-Webster tracks over 500 new words in our English vocabulary. I’m not sure how any of us keep up. Although I’ve never spoken or written it, when a word like “meme” keeps appearing, I have to do some digging to find out what in the world it means.
Words have been appearing and morphing ever since Eden. If you doubt that, try to read an original King James Bible and compare that Elizabethan garble to the Bibles we read today.
Most of us would need a translator if that first KJV was all we had.
One word never changes. Thank God that Jesus, the Word, remains the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Gene Shelburne is pastor emeritus of the Anna Street Church of Christ, 2310 Anna Street, Amarillo, Texas. Contact him at GeneShel@aol.com, or get his books and magazines at www.christianappeal.com. His column has run on the Faith page for almost four decades.
This article originally appeared on Amarillo Globe-News: Shelburne faith column: The vocabulary challenge continues