Stumpside Chats #12
Linguistic Illiteracy [Jul 19, 2024]
I wanted to write this Stumpside back a few months ago when I first heard the story I am about to relay to you, however this was during the time where I had no internet due to the tornado. Now I can finally write it. Anyways, I was inspired to write this as I sat in church on a Sunday morning listening to the sermon.
For context, my church is Baptist (non-denominational; as unaffiliated with any other Baptist group), the pastor is a White Boomer in his late 70s, and the congregation is mostly comprised of White Boomers. There are a few younger people there, but not as many older people.
As you can imagine, Israel is a very popular topic. More to the point: most of the congregation are true Lions of Zion. As some of you may have guessed, my article “A Letter to Evangelicals” was largely informed by me time in this same church. Anyways, this particular sermon was discussing how we should all die for Israel and all that. Even before October 7th, these sorts of sermons were not particularly uncommon, as is (unfortunately) typical of contemporary Baptists.
But I don’t really want to address that here. As I mentioned before, I’ve already discussed this at length in previous posts. Instead I want to talk about a very minor aspect of the sermon which, I’m sure, nobody but me even thought about.
The pastor was making some sort of comment about how the Jews are always unfairly oppressed and yadda yadda. He then specifically went on to say something like “the Jews today are fighting the same enemies mentioned here in this verse [referring to Philistines]; the Palestinians… and just like then, the Palestinians seek the total eradication of Israel today.”
Man that one really ground my gears. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of Old Testament history knows that the Philistines were in all likelihood Greeks fleeing the Greek Peninsula during the Late Bronze Age Collapse, who then mixed in to the local population of the Levant.1 In all likelihood, they were (one group) of the infamous “Sea Peoples” of the Bronze Age Collapse, who were essentially Greek farmers who fled mass famine in their homeland and turned to lives of raiding and/or conquest in nearby lands to survive.
Now, I don’t know that I would say that my pastor is stupid. Yes, a product of his generation. Of that there is no doubt. But, when he isn’t telling us to die for Israel, his Biblical exegesis is pretty good. The problems generally start to arise when he gets outside of his field and starts to talk about history, politics, or STEM on a more general scale. He just generally doesn’t know what he is talking about, like what happened here.
He [naively] assumed that since “Philistine” and “Palestine” sort of sound similar, and because they are both historical enemies of Israel, that they are the same. This is what I want to talk about.
This confusion of homophones is really grating to me. Ostensibly, it seems to arise when midwits and the like try to determine the meaning of a word they don’t already know. It’s sort of like breaking down a word into its root words, except they don’t even know what the root words mean. It ends up being a sort of deranged game of telephone between academics and laymen, except the laymen never even picked up the phone and just made something up entirely on their own.
This is something that happens a lot for whatever reason. I recall seeing a screenshot of a tumblr thread while scrolling iFunny once wherein some libtarded tumblrite was, as usual, whining about “le patriarchy bad.”
Specifically, they were saying that various words were broken down into the words “his,” “man,” etc. which represents the patriarchal view of history and culture, such that men are the only ones who accomplish anything ever [true by the way]. Anyways, this thread just so happened to cross the feed of some autistic linguist on tumblr who then proceeded to write a huge wall of text charting the linguistic history and evolution of the words as a refutation for the OP’s surface level midwit take. I would include it here if I could find it but I can’t. If any of you know what I’m talking about and have it, I would appreciate it if you sent it to me.
More infamous than that example [though very similar in form and execution] is that whole “Awomen” thing:
I seriously don’t know why people do this. It is not THAT hard to look these things up. And you really should look them up if you are in a position of influence, otherwise you will embarrass yourself and become a meme for people on the internet for years to come. I mean pretty much every person right of center jokes about “Awomen” because of how stupid it was.
Anyways, this sort of thing has a lot of polemical appeal to the people already in your echo chamber. You can imagine when the previously mentioned tumblr OP posted their initial comment about “history” and patriarchy that a legion of obese women on tumblr solemnly shook their heads at this clear and brazen example of White male heteronormativity. But it is also egregiously embarrassing outside of your echo chamber.
So basically, don’t ever make this mistake and make sure to point and laugh at anyone who does.
Feldman et al. “Ancient DNA sheds light on the genetic origins of early Iron Age Philistines” in Science Advances Vol. 5, Iss. 7 (06/03/2019). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aax0061.