Tuesday, July 20, 2010

On fear

Just an interesting point a sacrament meeting speaker made recently: The word fear is problematic in religious contexts, because it’s ambiguous. Therefore, it becomes necessary to contrast what i as a linguist might call fearreverence and fearshame (with reverence and shame being the words the speaker used).

2 comments:

Heather the Mama Duk said...

It's an important distinction because of the whole fearing the Lord thing that a lot of people don't get right.

David B said...

See, yet another reason for people to take a History of the English Language class—you learn all about shifts like this from Early Modern English to Present-Day English.

Not that making such a suggestion would be self-serving for myself as a linguistics professor, of course—no, not at all.☺