Education

 

The topic of 'Education' has been popping up in conversation recently, and it got me to thinking — always a dangerous situation.  One of those conversations centered around my time at St. Augustine Diocesan High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., a Catholic school for boys.

My spouse is a Protestant, and so we have distinct differences as regards religion and The Bible.  For one thing, Protestants revere The Bible and study it methodically; Catholics, not so much.  With regard to the Old Testament, Catholics, as a general rule, learn about Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, The Exodus from Egypt, the Ten Commandments, and other 'high points', but largely ignore the pieces between.

...As a general rule...

At a Catholic High School for boys (or for girls, for that matter) 'Religion' is a required subject, and typically focuses on Catholic doctrine and dogma.  At St. Augustine, whether by accident or design, my freshman Religion instructor was Brother Robert FSC, and Br. Robert taught a very different sort of class.  He focused on "Biblical exegesis", the extraction of meaning from the text.  He taught, for instance, that Jonah was swallowed by a whale, but that 'swallowed by a whale' did not mean what the literal words signify.  Today, we would say that Jonah got himself into a jam, and those words don't mean what they seem to imply, either.  Another lesson was on "Belshazar's Feast".

In the Book of Daniel, there is a scene (at the feast) where a ghostly finger appears and begins writing Hebrew characters on the wall (from which we get the phrase 'the handwriting on the wall').  Belshazar calls in his wise men and wants to know what the finger wrote.  They are stumped because, even though they can read Hebrew, the words don't seem to make sense.  The words were "Mene, mene, tekkel, upharsin".  "Tekkel" (or shekel) is a coin and a weight, and only the context can tell you which one is meant.  "Mene" is also a coin, half a shekel, and is sometimes used as a token in counting games (unless there's another 'mene' that isn't a coin).  "Upharsin" has a rainbow of meanings, and interpretation is a bear because Hebrew doesn't have vowels, so depending on which vowel-ish things one chooses when pronouncing the words and where they get inserted among the consonants, "upharsin" can mean "divide", or "Persian", and a few other things.

Daniel, a Hebrew slave at Belshazar's court, is called in and given a shot at explaining the handwriting on the wall.  Daniel looks and shortly tells Belshazar "It says: (mene mene) your days are numbered, (tekkel) you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting, (upharsin) your kingdom will be divided and given to the Medes and the Persians."  Naturally, all this comes to pass and Belshazar gets what's coming to him.

Sometime back, wife invited me to a Bible Study because the topic was "The Book of Daniel", and I got to explain to a roomful of Biblically-well-read folk why Daniel said what he said.  They were suitably impressed that a Catholic knew all that.

People constantly hit me with "How do you know all this stuff?"  That's easy...  I got a really good education.

 

'Less' vs 'Fewer'

 

English is a marvelous language.  It's said to be a bear to learn for E2L students because it has so many little quirks, but those quirks also make it deliciously precise.  It's that built-in precision that — in most cases — allows a native speaker of English to understand a foreigner even when they make the sort of mistake that non-native speakers might make.

For native speakers, there's no excuse for not exercising the precision our native tongue grants us.

Lately, I've been noticing — especially in TV advertising — instances where 'less' and 'fewer' are being misused.  The classic example is seen at the supermarket check-out line: "10 items or less", which is wrongwrongwrongwrongwrong.

The easy-to-remember rule-of-thumb is that 'fewer' is always associated with a plural object: (e.g.) fewer dollars, fewer children; 'less' is always associated with a singular object: (e.g.) less wealth.  Alternatively, you can say that 'fewer' is digital (or discrete) and 'less' is analog (or continuous); if you can have 2 or 3 but not 2.5, 'fewer'.  Fewer dollars means less wealth; 10 items or fewer; less waiting time means fewer minutes spent on 'hold'.  Easy-peasy.