Month: January 2024

How American English and Hiberno-English Influence Each Other

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

I remember being at a church-related event here in Ireland where the American emcee “dismissed” the people at the end of the service. He grew a little flustered when the congregation, primarily Irish, burst into shrieks of laughter instead of departing in a reverent hush as one might expect.

Alas, it was but another breakdown in communication between English speakers from the US and English speakers from Ireland. At times we assume too great a similarity between our respective iterations of that vast and storied language. In Ireland, to dismiss someone means to fire them, as in to let them go, to sack them, to terminate, to send packing, to axe. Our American friend had just buoyantly informed everyone at church that they had lost their jobs.

In my six years as an American expatriate to Ireland, I have encountered a common trope among Irish people: they believe Americanisms are ruining their beloved Hiberno-English. Hiberno-English, for the uninitiated, is the English spoken in Hibernia, which is the moniker the Roman general Tacitus gave to Ireland. (Hibernia means ‘wintry land’ and it’s related to hibernate*.)

For instance, a classmate named Caoimhe** complained that her young son pronounces ORANGE the way it’s pronounced on American TV: AWR-inj. And someone else once opined that MOVIE sounds out of place in Hiberno-English, the purists preferring FILM, which for some inexplicable reason the Irish pronounce FIL-uhm.

All of this I acknowledge and I hang my American-born head in shame. But in all fairness (to use a common Waterford expression), it works both ways; the Irish also influence American English. Just in the past month, I heard expressions like GOBSMACKED and LEAVE IT WITH ME in American podcast episodes.

I have two theories for why Americans would borrow from Hiberno-English: First, in the last few centuries many Irish emigrated across the pond (an expression that always makes me feel like a doofus for the first split second after using it). These Irish played no small part in shaping American English, and thus when modern Americans encounter their linguistic palimpsest*** they incorporate the words quite naturally. And second, all the Americans I know are infatuated with Ireland, or at least what they think is Ireland, and they find it exotic to use Irish-isms.

Taken together, then, it only follows that they would be quick to adapt Irish staples like GOBSHITE****, ARSED, BANJAXED, and GURRIER.

Anyway, thanks for listening, you are all dismissed.

*So now we know.

**Almost certainly, that wasn’t her name, I just wanted to use a hyper-stereotypical Irish name. It’s pronounced KWEE-va, by the way, and it means beautiful.

***Definitely felt like a doofus

****Funny how I knew immediately what the word meant when I first heard it upon arriving in Ireland.

To the Outfit Who Write Obituaries

Gideon YutzyLeave a comment

When the attendees at my funeral consider my life, what will rise to the surface.

Some mornings you just wake up thinking about this.

Is someone going to go up front and write on a whiteboard: Was Gideon Yutzy’s life a net positive. How? Why? Discuss. What would people say? That I made really good cheese scones and apple streusel muffins (I do), or I had nice teeth (I don’t) or that I ran half-marathons?

My guess is they would talk about my 4 daughters quite a bit, and my wife, which is fine, I’m happy to be associated with them, but that’s not really about my accomplishments. I remember the Psalm that was read at my grandfather’s funeral, Psalm 90: bless thou the work of our hands, yea the work of our hands, establish thou it. He was three years short of a hundred when he died and he had started several little magazines among the Amish. Seemingly the work of his hands had been established, yea, established right well.

I also remember the book The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People and how the author assigned readers to write their own obituaries. It was a pretty decent, if somewhat macabre, exercise. The intent was to get us thinking about what all we might accomplish in our freakishly short lives. In the one I wrote, because the author had seduced me into a hyper-productive stupor, I said how Gideon Yutzy had “volunteered at homeless shelters” and how he always, always paid his blooming taxes.

Fine, that’s all fine. But in the intervening years (contravening years? I can never remember) since I read the book I have become a little cynical about the whole enterprise of building a life, or least in the sense of building some elaborate edifice. If you make an edifice people may point to it and say, wow, he really succeeded in everything, and didn’t he have a Midas touch with everything he put his hand to—I mean that’s all fine, but I worry that it’s going to come off a little hollow when the weary mourners trudge back to their cars after eating their potato salad and baked beans.

And none of this is to dunk on successful people, some of my best friends are successful. It’s just that I would also like people at my funeral to feel like they lost a human being who knew how to cry, empathise, and for goodness’ sake, how to fail. If you want to impress people tell them about your success but if you want to connect with people tell them about your problems, and if you want people to come to your funeral you sure as heck ought to go to theirs. Ha ha. I find that about 12 percent of people get the humour in that classic line from Yogi Berra. Once I quoted it at a Catholic men’s prayer breakfast a friend had invited me to and they all got it immediately and laughed. Everyone one of them. Gut level and spontaneous wheeze-laughter. It was gratifying but also a little eerie and medieval.

But yes, that my obituary would make it clear that I was a human who tried to show up. That I had learnt how to get down into the hole with people and not just make sad noises from above, which Brene Brown calls the difference between empathy and sympathy. It’s also okay if there’s a line or two about my egregious flaws. He was a pain in the neck at times and he wasn’t a naturally good listener and could be quite the self-absorbed little doofus, but other than that he was an okay bloke who took his daughters on dates and did the odd bit of homesteading. Because he tried not to put people in boxes, they felt comfortable to be themselves around him.

He used all available time and energy and resources to have his character transformed into the unrepeatable life he was sent to live.

Reading the Bible – Subversive or Formative? (Hint: It’s Both.)

Gideon Yutzy5 Comments

I am looking forward to watching The Last Priests in Ireland, Ardal O’Hanlon’s new documentary coming out tomorrow evening.

In O’Hanlon’s interview yesterday with Brendan O’Connor, the two men discuss how women “of a certain vintage” sometimes tell them they would make good priests. As a comedian-actor and interviewer respectively, they both create cathartic spaces for their audiences. Reflection, transcendence, irony, and a fresh perspective on the world–all aspects of the human condition associated with religion–are all part of their job.

The two men reminisced about a period in the 1990’s when it seemed Irish Catholicism was going to have a renaissance, a “hippie moment for the church.” Almost wistfully, they described a brief period when more Catholics were reading the Bible for themselves rather than getting all their answers from the catechism.

I realised then that they view reading the Bible as an act of subversion against the stagnation of religious institutions, and suddenly I saw my own Protestant and Anabaptist heritage in a new light. For all the flippant iconoclasm of Protestant Christianity, there is one stroke of genius we stumbled upon and have largely maintained until today. Despite the nuclear fission that recently saw us exceeding the 40,000-denominations threshold, it still survives.

The Bible, we have insisted, is for all people.

The Bible is a public document.

Let me add in the same breath that there are many ways this has been abused. We cherry-pick verses to fit our pet beliefs. We find a translation that excuses us from following Jesus completely. As self-proclaimed mini popes, we dogmatise an obscure or novel interpretation and cause yet further division.

Had I been invited to O’Connor and O’Hanlon’s interview, I might have pointed out that I envy certain aspects of Catholicism and Orthodoxy. I love the lectionary, for instance, and I don’t know why many Protestants have abandoned it. (Thankfully, the Methodist church we attend still follows a condensed form of it.) By following the lectionary, Catholics are formed by the full range of the Bible, which in reality is not a book but a library. Each Sunday they get the Pentateuch, the prophets, the Gospels and the epistles.

The creation story in Genesis, when it is read in a liturgical setting, can be received in quiet reverence as an ancient defence of the inherent goodness of creation. In contrast, a Protestant pastor might tack scattered bits of the story onto his pre-packaged sermon about how dinosaurs existed 4000 years ago and how anyone who denies this is a reprobate.

Not to sound nauseatingly balanced and domesticated, but maybe the solution is to marry the best of both worlds, the formational nature of the Catholic approach to scripture and the free inquiry of Protestants.

On one hand, we could continue the Protestant tradition of valuing the insights of all believers, not just the popes and the bishops (not just the men, I almost said, but that sounds snarky). On the other hand, we could create spaces where we pause our questions and protestings and let scripture speak to us. In communion with millions of other members of Christ’s body around the world, we could take in long-form and uninterrupted readings from the lectionary.

Having more adequately digested scripture, we would then have more authority to question, to reflect, to interpret, and yes, where necessary, to subvert. To travail in birth again, as it says in Galatians, until Christ be fully formed in us.

What Is God Interested In?

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For reasons I haven’t fully processed, I am put off by Answers in Genesis.

The organisation behind the enormous replica of Noah’s Ark as well as the Creation Museum, they are a major reason why tourists come to Kentucky every year. Their founder Ken Ham is famous for his interpretation of Genesis which holds that the universe was created 6,000 years ago in six 24-hour days.

Recently, I sent Answers in Genesis an email asking them how they can believe Genesis is one straightforward, encyclopedia-style recounting of natural history when there are in fact two different creation accounts in the first and second chapters of Genesis. The differences are not minor either; they include the sequence of creation, the method of creation and the way God is portrayed. This was not made up by some Bible scholar, it is there for all to see.

The gentleman who answered my email was civil and kind, probably more so than I had been in my original email, and for a moment I wondered if my dislike for Answers in Genesis is an overreaction. After all, one could conceive of worse tourist attractions, like celebrating slavery, for instance.

Yet I have to wonder if the endeavour is a net positive. In taking the position they have, Answers in Genesis shut themselves off from many of humanity’s finest minds, of both religious scholars and scientists from several different continents who independently came to their conclusions about the theory of evolution. And goodness knows the amount of seekers who, having a genuine curiosity about the Christian faith, are thwarted in their search because of the untenable version of Christianity they encounter on the Ark.

Musing further, I wondered what would happen if the organisation changed its name to Questions in Genesis and created a space where people could wrestle with this magnificent, multi-layered origins story. Would this not be better than condemning people who doubt Ken Ham’s novel interpretation of Genesis? Better than comparing such people who mocked Noah’s Ark, as Answers in Genesis blatantly does? (Their interpretation of the Genesis flood story is another matter entirely but let’s not go there.)

Perhaps too smugly, I comforted myself that I don’t mislead people by mapping modern questions onto Genesis. Yet while Answers in Genesis may be guilty of using the Bible to promote a fear-based agenda, they are not the only ones to have done so. Too often I also cling to positions that shut down communication and connection. We all, from time to time, retreat or refuse to engage with those who differ from us.

Some would say this response is natural and even partially good. How else does a child learn who and what to trust? How else would our hunter-gatherer ancestors have dealt with dangerous wild animals? (My apologies for that last question, Answers in Genesis–I know it’s a non-starter for you.)

Yet the organisation’s obsession with treating the Bible as an answers dispenser that shuts down honest inquiry does remain a problem. The thing with answers is that we can memorise them, know them inside and out, and master them. But what if the Bible was meant to unsettle and deeply disorient us before it yields up answers of any sort?

Is it possible to learn more of the Bible’s contents even as we grow increasingly ignorant of its purpose? As Dallas Willard once asked, “Has our presumed familiarity led to unfamiliarity, our unfamiliarity to contempt, and our contempt to profound ignorance?”

Any interpretation of the Bible that prioritises correct doctrine over authentic connection with God and our fellow image-bearers is a wrong interpretation. Not only is it a wrong interpretation, it is a harmful interpretation, a net negative, a destructive force unleashed in society.

Whatever my position, even I justify it by claiming obedience to God, if it does not nurture my everyday flesh-and-blood relationships, it is only a resounding gong and a clanging cymbal.

I began this post by giving my tuppence about Answers in Genesis. I implied that God is not interested in a project that is so self-serving and narrow-minded. But I am not so arrogant to think that I am morally superior. I am self-aware enough to know I also have things in my life God isn’t interested in.

God isn’t interested when I go to great lengths to prove I am more correct, or more sophisticated, or more enlightened, or more authentic than my neighbor. God is not interested in my storing up of grievances, my keeping track of the sins my family members or acquaintances have committed against me. God is not interested in a faith that says love God but not the creation, or love humanity but not the humans God places around us. God is not even interested in my knowledge of the Bible if it only serves to prop me up and make other people seem benighted, hell-bound or both.

The God revealed in Jesus is interested in our humility and contrition more than our being right; in our connection with others, not sitting in judgment of them; in mercy, not in sacrifice.

On this truth hang all the law and prophets.