April 30, 2107  There was an interesting short feature on PRI’s The World radio program several weeks ago about religious language which is very much worth sharing.  Readers of The Better Editor probably recognize that new and interesting words catch my interest.  The actual feature from The World seems to be missing, but that’s okay because it was just an abbreviated version of this podcast from PRI’s The World in Words.  The podcast focused on Christianese, an arguably distinct form of English that qualifies as a religiolect.  Broadly speaking, a religiolect is a dialect of a language that’s specific to a particular religious group.  For example, the podcast prior to that one discussed Judeo-Arabic, a dialect of Arabic once widely spoken by Iraqi Jews but now dying out.  The term would also cover Yiddish, Ladino, and any other variant of a language spoken primarily by a distinct religious group within a larger culture (the examples you’ll find primarily discuss Jewish religiolects, as that’s where the academic work has focused, but the concept can be applied to any religion).  The term religiolect was coined by Benjamin Hary, Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at NYU, in his 1992 book “Multiglossia in Judeo-Arabic.”  Hary uses a definition in a later publication that’s very useful for being so concise:  a religiolect is “a language variety with its own history and development, which is used by a religious community.”  (Hary explains the concept himself in that prior The World in Words podcast, beginning around 3:15.)  It’s a useful word explaining an easily-understood concept.  The word merges religion (or religious) and dialect, which might lead some to say that it’s not strictly necessary, but it seems to me the new word provides something its parent words didn’t, in the same way that infomercial holds a distinct and expanded meaning over the origin words informative commercial.  The podcast delves into the idea of Christianese, plausibly described as a developing religiolect of American Christians.  As an unidentified voice says in a preview plug for the podcast, Christianese is “nuanced and cryptic and almost entirely unnecessary,” but it has a lot of users.  The dialect being described here is probably better labelled “Evangelicalese,” because it doesn’t apply broadly to all Christians, while other strains of Christianity likely have their own dialects.  Christianese uses something like an overlay of additional vocabulary and modified grammar.  On the vocabulary side, there are terms like “god shot” (positive coincidence or synchronicity, attributed to the active agency of a higher power) and “pre-Christian” (a noun; someone who isn’t a Christian, a non-Christian).  Where the grammar is concerned, phrases with unusual uses of prepositions, such as “felt led to,” “spoke into,” and “loved on me” are often cited.  (If these terms confuse you, a good start for help is the Dictionary of Christianese, compiled by Tim Stewart).  I had fairly extensive contact with a form of Christianese some time back but never made the connection that it could be a full dialect until I heard this segment.  Close to 20 years ago, I lived in a southern US city for a couple of years and many of my co-workers used this lingo among themselves (and with others).  Back then, I chalked it up to it being part of their southern religious background, but now I see it was a sort of Christianese.  Christianese acts as a jargon (not a slang), a set of terms and word usages that identify members of a group.  It’s the same for accountants, or lawyers, or . . . writers and editors.  For that matter, it’s the same for hockey players, or video-gamers, or vegans.  I wouldn’t dream of singling out Christianese for ridicule on the grounds that it’s an unnecessary, silly dialect, any more than I’d do it with the jargon used by these other groups.  The term Christianese is of uncertain origin, and it hasn’t made it into any of the major dictionaries yet.  The Word Spy site dates first use of the term to 1986.  That citation is a little vague about the specific meaning, but a second one they offer from 1988 very clearly lines up with the word’s meaning today.  Christopher Daly  https://thebettereditor.wordpress.com/2017/04/30/american-religiolect-christianese-evangelicalese/

Tally Ho Tomato Pudding contains bread cubes, tomato puree, brown sugar, water and butter.  Find recipe at http://recipeofhealth.com/recipe/tally-ho-tomato-pudding-164932rb?parametr=kitchen

NAME CHANGES  Singer Vic Damone (born ‎Vito Rocco Farinola 1928)  Lyricist Andy Razaf  (born Andrea Paul Razafkeriefo 1895)  http://www.songwritershalloffame.org/exhibits/C305  Composer Sammy Fain (born Samuel Feinberg 1902)  http://www.songwritershalloffame.org/exhibits/C50  Composer Vernon Duke (born Vladimir Alexandrovich Dukelsky 1903)  http://www.songwritershalloffame.org/exhibits/bio/C64  Composer

Irving Berlin (born Israel Baline 1888)  http://blog.roundabouttheatre.org/2016/10/12/the-life-of-irving-berlin/

Dexterous comes from the Latin word dexter, meaning "on the right side."  Since most people are right-handed, and therefore do things more easily with their right hand, dexter developed the sense of skillful.  English speakers crafted dexterous from dexter and have been using the resulting adjective for anyone who is skillful-in either a physical or mental capacity-since at least the early 1600s.  The adjective ambidextrous, which combines dexter with the Latin prefix ambi-, meaning "both," describes one who is able to use both hands in an equally skillful way.  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dexterous

Out of the Woods/Out of the Woodwork  Given how much of Europe and North America was originally covered in deep forest, it’s not surprising that English has scads of figures of speech involving wood.  The word “wood” itself is, of course, very old, derived from Germanic roots meaning both trees collectively and the stuff trees are made of.  We also have a range of words for trees growing together, from a “stand” of a few trees, to a larger “grove” or “copse,” to the sort of limitless “forest” so rare today.  A “wood” (in the US, we usually say “woods”) falls between a “copse” and a “forest” in size.  “Wood” or “woods” also seems the default word in such uses as “babe in the woods,” meaning an extremely naïve and vulnerable person (from fairy tales about children abandoned in forests) to less common phrases such as “in a wood,” meaning “in difficulty” or “perplexed.”  For much of human history, traveling through (or worse, being lost in) a dense wood was very perilous, posing dangers ranging from death from exposure to death by becoming lunch for bears or wolves.  Thus “not out of the woods yet,” a phrase which first appeared in the late 18th century, carries the sense of still being in danger although progress towards safety (or some goal) is being made, much as a group of lost travelers in a forest who have found the path home may be encouraged and optimistic, but should not be complacent.  While “woodwork” has been used since the 17th century to mean simply “an article made of wood,” it’s most commonly used today to mean the interior wooden fittings (baseboards, molding, trim, cabinets, etc.) of a house or apartment.  Of course, what we call “woodwork” a variety of unwelcome guests (mice, insects, etc.) call “home,” so “to come out of the woodwork” is a popular phrase meaning “to emerge from obscurity” or “to come out of hiding,” much as mice or cockroaches creep out when the lights are turned off.  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase “crawl out of the woodwork” first appeared in print in the mid-1960s (“These nutboys start crawling out of the woodwork,” 1964).  The phrase is also sometimes used in a sardonic sense to mean simply “making a sudden splash after a period of obscurity”  http://www.word-detective.com/2011/01/out-of-the-woodswoodwork/

What is going on in our brains when we smile?  When our brains feel happy, endorphins are produced and neuronal signals are transmitted to your facial muscles to trigger a smile.  This is the start of the positive feedback loop of happiness.  When our smiling muscles contract, they fire a signal back to the brain, stimulating our reward system, and further increasing our level of happy hormones, or endorphins.  Fake it till you make it!   Does faking a smile sound hard to you?  No worries.  Just be with someone who smiles.  A Swedish study found that it is indeed difficult to keep a long face when you look at people who are smiling at you.  Ding Li  https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/famelab-whats-science-behind-smile

WestLaw Story  Which legal online service to use?  See a parody on West Side Story (Lexis v. Westlaw v. Bloomberg Law) from Columbia Law Revue  April 16, 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3VpSxoGHKw  4:56  Thank you, Muse reader!

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1703  May 3, 2017  On this date in 1937, Margaret Mitchell, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Gone with the Wind, a novel written in 1936.  On this date in 1960, the Off-Broadway musical comedy The Fantasticks opened in New York City's Greenwich Village, eventually becoming the longest-running musical of all time.