Does anyone else think too much in the shower? I lather my hair and my mind wanders down odd side tracks and into cul-de-sacs. A quick rinse is never enough. Even on busy mornings, I stretch time to follow my thoughts.
This morning, my mind began to wonder about the American pronunciation of the word ‘herb’, which is ‘erb. Was this an older form of the way we say it, fossilised from when America was colonised? Most likely, I thought. Does this mean that they would say an herb rather than a herb? Again, I answered in the affirmative. If we say an hour, it makes sense that they would say an herb. After all, we sometimes see a history and an history in printed form.
How did I come to mull over this word? I have been hearing it a lot while listening to both podcasts and lately, when listening to the Old Testament as an audiobook. I don’t know how I came to buy an American version rather than the one narrated by David Suchet of Poirot fame. However, I am used to the American woman’s voice by now and will have the pleasure of listening to her for the next 65 hours.
I decided to listen to the Old Testament because I have only ever known fragments of it. The classic stories like Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, Moses and the Exodus, the Ten Commandments and Lot’s wife turning to salt were about the extent of my knowledge. And some Psalms of course. I wanted to go deeper to understand more of the foundation of the three Abrahamic religions, namely Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Of these three, Islam split off quite early, following the lineage of Ishmael, son of Abraham, while Judaism from whence Christianity originated, followed the lineage of Isaac, Abraham’s other son. However, in Islam, Isaac, Moses and Jesus are still acknowledged as prophets.
I was thinking about these things and the language used in the translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew. There’s much begetting, smiting and going in under women. Smite, smitten, smote. I have only been smitten in the positive sense. But I guess that too has the implication of being inflicted a heavy blow, like being hit with Cupid’s arrow.
There are a multitude of abominations and even more circumcisions. King Saul demanded that David bring 100 foreskins of Philistines as a price for Michal, his daughter. How did he carry them back, I wondered. In a bag or perhaps pierced on a stick? I did squirm a little at that thought. I’m only part way through and I’m already desensitised to the brutal killings, wiping out of whole towns including women, children and ‘sucklings’.
Words have always fascinated me. To tarry for example. In the bible it means to wait or to linger for longer than intended. It has a sense of being delayed by someone or something. Nowadays when we tarry, we are slow in action or in departure, but it is rarely used in everyday speech. I can only imagine it used satirically as in, ‘tarry not, young wench!’
I have tarried too long under the shower. Time to rinse off the ‘erbal conditioner and seize the day, lest I be smote for the abomination of wasting precious resources of this dry country.
From Quill to Quote 