Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

["Parlin, Steven" <PARLINS AT culver.org>]

Mike,

 

Thanks for the McWhorter reference. I teach a class on language, Language Play, and one of the units is on language change and history. This will be a good read, I think.

 

Goodbye

 

"penicumanal"? ... a hoot.

 

Steve

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Frentz [mailto:mfrentz AT bbn.com]
Sent: Tuesday, August 12, 2003 3:22 PM
To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion
Subject: Re: [percy-l] gay marriage

I'm reading an interesting book now on the evolution of language (actually, the author is very particular to call it "transformation" of language, breaking the biological parallel, because evolution implies advancement rather than just change):  McWhorter, "The Power of Babel".  It's interesting how much of language had sacred roots before its transformation to present day secular usage.  For instance, goodbye is a basically a phonetic decay from "God, be with you".  He discusses how both phonetics and semantics are prone to change over time, sometimes rather dramatically.

Given the concurrent existence of the real (i.e. sacred) and primal thing, called "marriage", not to mention the parallel (grossly diluted in recent decades, but still somewhat solemn) secularized version, a new word would definitely seem to be in order.  Each of the original meanings does still at least serve the higher purpose of bringing about children (peripherally at least, if not primarily anymore, in common usage). 

A "penicumanal pact" comes to mind as being accurate.  Any stronger, or more solemn word would seem silly (in present day usage of the word, i.e. through semantic degradation, silly devolved from originally meaning "holy" to --> blameless -->  innocent  --> childish  -->  foolish ). 


Mike



At 03:02 PM 8/12/2003 -0400, you wrote:

In my dictionary, "marriage" in the example of minds meeting is a seperate definition of the more common defintion, which does in fact necessitate there being a man and a woman, and not two people of the same sex.

Im not sure how much efffect this has on the debate on whether gay marriage should be legalized. I do feel that opponents to gay marriages are using the defintion of "marriage" in defense of their view, but thats not set in stone. If something that looks like gay people being married becomes legal, then the defintion of marriage would have to be altered, or a new word would have to be invented. Any ideas on what that word might look like? 

 



 

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