I go to Starbucks way too often. Not because I love the coffee, but because it is a convenient place to meet people. It's close by, it is free to go there, you can buy a drink, and they have casual seating. We need a place like that, a kind of daytime club. A coffee bar. Let's clear some things up. I'm not talking about "meet people" like a single person would do in a bar, but more like meet people; as in arrange to get together for a meeting. Sometimes I meet people who don't normally go to Starbucks. It is a new experience for them. We order drinks like Lattes in sizes that are trendy sounding, unless you are Italian. Apparently anything in our own language is not trendy unless you improperly use the word with a "new" definition. When I was a kid, good stuff became "bad". Michael Jackson even wrote a little tune about the new meaning of bad for us. "Word" means an answer in the affirmative. We don't actually have any new words. We recycle the current ones and give them meanings that will confuse people who feel as if they have a handle on the English language.
Consider the World Wide Web. This is the www we put in front of an address to find something electronically. Finding an address is nothing new. They made maps for that. Still do. You find things on the web. A web is what a spider makes. But this web we surf on. Confused yet? We program web addresses using Hypertext Markup Language. Hypertext. Sounds like a term from Star Trek. Learning a foreign language just became trendy. Who understands all this stuff? Lucky for us there are internet providers. A provider is such a friendly, helpful term. There are web hosts. Once again, sounds friendly, helpful, and free. But they are not.
Consider your computer. You need security. You better have a good firewall. I bet you didn't know your computer would catch on fire without one. Or worse. Your computer can catch a virus. That is bad. But if you have a video that goes viral? That is good. Rip music from a CD is fine. Rip off a CD from the store and you go to jail.
Do you have a DVD burner? Do you want to burn CDs? Will it work if I have a firewall installed? How many ports do you have, matey? Dual drives, givin' her all she's got Captain? (2 Star Trek references in one blog!) Not enough memory? My computer is frozen, yet is very warm to the touch. One stroke (rowing) on the keyboard (typewriter) in the upper left (boxing) for a quick escape (magician or criminal).
I heard a sermon recently where we were given the ancient Greek translation of a simple English word in the Bible. The Greek word was described as having a different meaning than we were familiar with when translated into English. And so it makes sense. Really, it does. There are so many new translations of the Bible. Even the stoic King James translation gets updated every few decades. Why? Because we make new uses for words that already had a perfectly good definition instead of creating a new word altogether. The original meaning of "bad" no longer represents "bad", so we have to make a new translation. The ancient words don't change, our words do. Same word; part two. After all, it seems easier to transition a word we are already familiar with into a new meaning. And it can be trendy. Trendy, by the way, is a hip replacement. Sorry to my readers with lesser English skills, that was a joke.
Nothing new under the sun you say? Lucky for us God is still the same today, tomorrow and yesterday.
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