What's Latin for "wank"?
I guess you could say that this is from the Jesus fandom. One of the two recent pieces of news out of the Vatican that pissed off most of the planet was that individual priests will be free to celebrate the Tridentine Mass whenever they damn well please. The Tridentine Mass is the Latin service used worldwide by all Catholics from the 16th century until about 1970. The structure of the service itself is different, not just what language it's celebrated in.

(Full disclosure: Yes, I am one of those whackjobs who attends this kind of Mass.)

Well, this has caused such global waves of wank in the press and on the Internets that the entire planet is red and sore by now. I have many examples, but my favorite so far has got to be this innocent-looking article from Indianapolis. All would have been well...if this paper didn't have forums attached to every article.

"A dead language for a dead god. How appropriate," one commenter said oh-so-cleverly. And...they're off! Catholics aren't Christians! Protestants don't understand history! Anyone who believes in God is a fucking moron! Pedophile priests! FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER!!!!11

I'd pick out highlights, but really...there's too much here.

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	doc_lydgate 2007-07-21 03:34 am UTC (link)
	I know!! Koine seems like a completely different language half the time, or at least a small scoop of the same vocab jammed through a completely different grammatical/syntactic system. Do you know the story of how that came to be? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

mummimamma
2007-07-26 07:35 pm UTC (link)

Well, koine is Greek written by and for people who had Greek as second (third, fourth...) language, so they occasionally used words/phrases/syntactical structures not common in Greek.

As Greek was the lingua franca of the Eastern Empire at that time, much as English is the lingua franca in much of the wold now it's similar to how I, Norwegian, would write in English to reach a bigger audience, since those who know Engslish outnumber the Norwegian-readers by ... billions. Anyhow, if we don't double check our language, not only for spelling mistakes, but from all first language influence in words, grammar, syntax, idioms, it ends up like Koine. One usually don't notice mistakes like that oneself - that is why we need - hmm (språkvask...) I'd call it "language laundry" in English - a native speaker too read through for strange words/grammar. They didn't do that with the NT. (They should have!)

And you managed to ask just (one of) the question(s) that can keep me going. Sorry! :)

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