The Fredösphere

I'll lay out my new plan to completely reëngineer the modern approach to colloquial English in a moment, but first:

Women are evil.  Especially mothers.  (Hat tips to 2Blowhards and Sequenza 21.)

So ... I was filing the role of cantor at church yesterday, and, as sometimes happens, I was struck by the austere beauty of an anachronistic wording of a hymn text, in this case, "My Faith Looks Up to Thee":

When ends life’s transient dream,
When death’s cold sullen stream
Over me roll....

For now, let's overlook the theological flakiness in the description of life as a "dream."  What caught my attention was the word "transient."  How often is that word used in casual conversation?  Almost never, right?  If you are a sound engineer or a social worker, you might use the word as a noun in professional situations (assuming, in the case of the social worker, it's still politically correct to refer to the homeless as transients) but I'll bet the adjective is used essentially never by anyone.

Worship theorists have fretted for decades now over the increasing disconnect between the diction of classic hymns and everyday speech.  Their solution has been an attempt to modify the diction of hymns:

• the traditional texts are mangled, causing embarrassment as half the congregation, running on autopilot, sings the old lyrics anyway;
• new texts are created in crude imitation of modern slang that don't really work at the time of creation, and suffer from very short shelf lives (call it the God-Is-For-Real-Manification of worship--where the King James Version is run through the Jive Filter--or maybe call it the Singing Nunnery); or
• New vocabularies are invented that attempt to avoid both archaicisms and fads (but that's hard to do; witness the bathetic "God of Concrete, God of Steel").

Thirty years of failed experiments tell you what you could have found out easier just by asking me:  we suffer from Mohamed-Mountain Prioritization Confusion in this case.  We who care about this problem simply need to organize and exert our collective will to recreate the current vernacular.

Yes, it's that easy.  I'm going to start a weekly theme here at this blog.  Every Monday I'll report on a old-fashioned word I noticed in the previous day's hymns.  All of us will commit to using that word at least one a day for a week in casual conversations.  The force of all of us, working in concert, will cause the word to capture the zeitgeist's attention.  If we keep this up, over the course of just a few years, the vulgar tongue will be realigned with the glorious language of the old hymns, and traditional worship will be vital and relevant again.

Glory.

So the word for this week is:

TRANSIENT

Let's get to work, people!

Labels: ArchaicWord