Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2013 August 26

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August 26

"burning in hell" metaphor

How old is this "burning in hell" metaphor? This metaphor is actually used in the music video Xandria's Save My Life, but the lyrics actually invert the phrase as such, "In hell I'm burning", indicating metaphorically that the narrator is somewhat doomed and needs help. In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Jane answers the orphanage caretaker that hell is a pit full of fire. Apparently, this "burning in hell" metaphor existed even in the 19th century! How old is this "burning in hell" metaphor? Why does hell have to be burning? Why can't it just be a torture room for the devil? Is salvation meant to save people from "burning hell", or is salvation meant to save people who are spiritually dead in their earthly sins? Sneazy (talk) 00:51, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

If you search for "fire" and "burn" in Hell, this gives a few clues. The idea of Hell being a fiery place seems to go back to the mists of antiquity and is shared by many cultures. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 00:56, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

JackofOz, are people supposed to capitalize "hell"? Why is "hell" capitalized? Could it be that "hell" is a proper name? Sneazy (talk) 01:19, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

I've always capitalised places like Hell, Heaven, Purgatory and Limbo. Our article seems to have one foot in Heaven and the other foot in heaven, a rather uncomfortable position, I would have thought. Maybe there are Upper, Middle and Lower Heavens. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 01:48, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

It appears that lower case for both heaven and hell are the preferred, including from the northern Europe root words. The exception is German, which of course capitalizes all nouns, so there might be some influence there, toward the less-preferred capitalizing; along with the assumption that those are physical places rather than concepts. Maybe kind of like the distinction between "god" and "God". However, my old Websters lists both as lower case; for heaven it says "often capitalized". No mention of capitalizing for hell. Webster also has purgatory as lower case. Likewise with limbo except it says "often capitalized". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:00, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

I can't see how there can be any controversy — they're place names, which makes them proper nouns, so they should be capitalized, period. Of course there are people who don't capitalize earth and moon, even when they don't mean "dirt" and "natural satellite" respectively, so the conclusion is that there are a lot of folks who just get this wrong. --Trovatore (talk) 02:03, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Webster likewise gives earth as lower case, and when referring to our planet it again says "often capitalized". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:08, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Webster is being overly descriptive here. The correct prescriptive explanation would specify that not capitalizing it, when referring to the planet, is an error. --Trovatore (talk) 19:45, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Heaven is cognate with German Himmel as well as English hammer, Greek acme, Russian kamen, and is where Thor's Hammer comes from (thunderbolts, fulgurites, and ancient, buried stone hammers). Hell simply means hole. The three words, heaven, hell and earth, are not capitalized when they are used in the mundane sense, but are capitalized when used in a religious or astronomical sense. μηδείς (talk) 02:15, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

That would be, as in "god" vs. "God", as I said above. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:32, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Would anyone write about "saturn" or "jupiter" or "venus"? No, of course not. So, when referring to the planet Earth, as distinct from bits of dirt, it of course should always take upper case. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 02:34, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

What we should do in English does not always equate to what we actually do. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:41, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

You mean, what we do do. μηδείς (talk) 02:46, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

I agree, Bugs. But Webster's may as well say, about Britain, "sometimes spelt Britian", or about Israel, "sometimes spelt Isreal", or about consensus, "sometimes spelt concensus". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 02:49, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Where is it spelled "Britian"? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:53, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Look for people who spell the planet Earth in lower case, and there you'll find your Britians, your mischeviouses, your "should of"s, your "your making me laugh"s and so on. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 03:07, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

You lost me at the bakery. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:10, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Jehovah's Witnesses have published information online at http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1200001978 and http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1101989234.

—Wavelength (talk) 00:59, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Sneazy, you are perfectly capable of using dictionaries, google, and etymology on line to answer questions like where the name hell comes from. For further study, the Greeks had their Plutonian Gate. Jews and Romans buried the dead, with the afterlife not being that pleasant: lemures. Palaeosiberian tribes believed that the dead lived underground, as did mammoths, whose attempts to enter this world (middle earth) caused earthquakes. (THey had cause reversed--frozen mammoth remains appeared at riverbanks disturbed by earthquakes. μηδείς (talk) 02:01, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

In the Christian religion, Hell isn't a place, it is a future event. It's purpose is to make an end to sin. I can't say why specifically burning is involved, as opposed to another means, but the fire will be used to symbolically eternally destroy all sinners. Torture does is not involved, nor does it factor into God's perfect Law (character). Ergo, the Devil is not exempt from this fate, and will be destroyed alongside all sinners. Salvation involves, among other things, both those which you suggest. There is no "once saved, always saved", nor is there a middle ground. A person's fate is determinated at the end of their life. Plasmic Physics (talk) 03:26, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Be careful about making sweeping statements of this kind of issue in terms of "the Christian religion". You should preface this with an explicit statement indicating that this is or may be particular to YOUR strand of Christianity, and also to explicitly state which strand that is. Christian views on Hell is a better place to direct someone as it presents some better picture of the diversity of beliefs on the matter. --Jayron32 11:14, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

The imagery of burning is used quite extensively throughout The Bible (e.g. Matthew 3:10-12). Fire, in the cited verse, destroys completely and that is accordingly the future of badness: destruction (Malachi 4:1). Hell is a word of Germanic origin, having to do with digging a hole [1]. The conversion of The Germanic peoples to Christianity brought different world-views side by side; the existing beliefs made it convenient to the missionaries to explain Bible teachings. Interestingly, the original-language words often translated as Hell (Hades, Gehenna, and Sheol) themselves are prophesied to be destroyed in fire (Revelation 20:14). Schyler (exquirere bonum ipsum) 01:06, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Aha, so the old expression "hell-hole" is redundant. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:23, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Not the whole of it, just the hole of it. But you could leave it in, just for the hell of it. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 06:18, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Term for singing better than speaking?

Not only do certain people with reported speech defects Mel Tillis sing their native languages "better" than they speak them, there are also foreigners like the singers of ABBA who can sing English far better than they can speak it. Is there a term, or terms, for this phenomenon? μηδείς (talk) 01:51, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

I don't know that comparing Mel Tillis with ABBA really works. People can learn to sing a particular song phonetically without actually speaking the language fluently. Look for a youtube of a Japanese choir singing Beethoven's Ninth in what sounds like perfect German. As regards Mel Tillis, I don't know what such a term would be, but it strikes me that he has something in common with James Earl Jones. Even though Jones is an accomplished actor and you'd never know he had a huge stuttering problem when he was young, sometimes when he's being interviewed he starts to lapse into the stutter a bit. And that leads to the one thread that might tie all three of these folks together: They are singing or speaking from a script rather than spontaneously. So, maybe "scripted"? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:06, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

You know, Medeis, I would have said the same thing to you that you could have easily used Google to do your own research. In any case, this website seems to answer your question, as it talks about how the melodies of songs can eliminate personal accents. The best term that may describe this phenomenon is homogenization. The voice is homogenized, so you hear flattened as opposed to accented voices.

The result is that when we sing, syllables are longer, vowels get stretched out, and stresses fall differently than in speech. In effect, regional accents disappear. The linguist David Crystal, writing about this process on his blog, says melody cancels out the intonations of speech, the beat of the music cancels the rhythms of speech, and singers are forced to accent syllables as they’re accented in the music.

Sneazy (talk) 02:39, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

My point with the above comment about looking things up is that you already had the word "hell" and were looking for its meaning and usage, which could be done easily by google or wiktionary or etymology on line searching the term. In my case I had the idea/ideas or meaning/meanings, but not the word(s), a much more difficult problem to google. The reference to Crystal was nonetheless quite helpful. Thanks. μηδείς (talk) 20:11, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

If you read my request more carefully, then you would have realized that my request was NOT searching for the meaning or etymology of "hell". I was concerned with the origin of the idiomatic phrase, "burning in hell". Also, it's none of your business to complain about the question. You either answer the question or ask for clarification. If you don't know the answer, please do not post. Sneazy (talk) 21:21, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Singing and talking share some common features but are still fundamentally different things. This points out some of the main differences. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 02:41, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Plus it's easier to remember verse than prose. I can sing the Welsh national anthem (very badly), but conversationally struggle to ask for a cup of tea. When we were learning French in junior school (8-11 year-olds), an experiment long since abandoned, the main method was to teach us lots of stupid songs. One I remember went "La chat, vous mangez la souris, / La souris a peur, la souris a peur!" or something similar, it was the best part of 50 years ago. Alansplodge (talk) 12:45, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Because of stuttering? Well, maybe you could sing the order. Maybe you could slightly alter the words to this song, which goes something like, "I love coffee, I love tea, I love the java jive, and it loves me - coffee and tea and the java and me, a cup a cup a cup a cup a cup...aaah!" ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:53, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

See Wodehouse's "The Truth About George" for potential problems with this strategy. Deor (talk) 20:20, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Sorry Bugs, I meant that I struggle to ask for a cup of tea in the Welsh language, although I can manage their national anthem (in Welsh), because songs are easier to learn by rote. Alansplodge (talk) 17:38, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Written works by Chelsea Manning

Where can I find a large corpus of writings by Chelsea Manning, in order to perform content analysis? I have in mind The Gender Genie. Besides the text at this page (female score: 65; male score: 214), I am looking for something more.
—Wavelength (talk) 14:57, 26 August 2013 (UTC) and 15:09, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

To the best of my knowledge there is no such corpus. Manning was not a published writer, and presumably most of the reports she generated in her professional career were formatted according to the turgid expectations of military prose, with no risk of individuality breaking out. --Orange Mike | Talk 15:39, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Manning wasn't known as a writer - more like the guy who takes the document from the writer, down to the basement, and hands it to the typesetter. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:21, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

That half reminds me of Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac: "This isn't writing, it's typing". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 18:24, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Brackets in some letters

Why some letters in a word have brackets, mainly whan you are quoting a person? e.g. [f]ascinating Miss Bono ^[zootalk] 16:03, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

It's a way of showing that the person doing the quoting has added words or letters to the original quote, or maybe changed the words for clarity. So, in your example, the quote was probably from the start of a sentence, so it was written 'Fascinating' (with a capital letter), but it needed to be used in the middle of a sentence where the capital would look odd. So the writer wanted to show that he had changed the spelling of the original quote.

Another example would be where someone is quoted referring to someone without actually saying their name. For instance, something like 'Bob Dylan said "He [Bono] is a lovely person".' - Bob's original quote was 'He is a lovely person', but without the extra information we don't know who he's talking about. - Cucumber Mike (talk) 16:10, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation Mike and thanks for the lovely example :) Miss Bono ^[zootalk] 16:13, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

For their use in Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Brackets and parentheses.

—Wavelength (talk) 16:24, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Also, three dots in a quote means that something has been omitted from the quote. For example, if you read

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution says that "Congress shall make no law [...] abridging [...] the right of the people peaceably to assemble,[...]."

words have been omitted from the quote in three different places -- the complete quote is "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." but if the current writer only wanted to focus on freedom to assemble, he needed to omit the other parts. Also, often [...] is written more simply as ... without the brackets. Duoduoduo (talk) 18:46, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, Duoduoduo Miss Bono ^[zootalk] 18:57, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Another question about on/in

What's the right way to say: That's the first chapter in/on/of the book? Miss Bono ^[zootalk] 16:20, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

"Of" and "in" are acceptable. "On" is not. Deor (talk) 16:33, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! :) Miss Bono ^[zootalk] 17:06, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

You tempt, nay invoke, my powers of contrivance, Deor.

Q. What are you reading lately?

A. "I'm reading a life of Tolstoy. I'm now getting to the part about how he wrote War and Peace. He's devoted three entire chapters just to this one major opus. Chapter 71 is the first chapter on the book." -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:24, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Jack, you have won the Gold Medal in the Olympic Men's Downhill Contrivance event by a clear margin. Many congratulations. Alansplodge (talk) 23:28, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

I want to thank my trainers, my family, my friends, my lovers, my fellow competitors, all the officials and volunteers, and of course the millions of messages from my many admirers all over the world. These all helped to keep me on course when the going got really tough. See you in 4 years time. Or maybe sooner.  :) -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 23:55, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Be careful - once you start with them plays-on-words, it's a slippery slope. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:25, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Refdesk threads usually stop when they reach the gutter! Alansplodge (talk) 12:55, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 18:21, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

And as Jack may have lost Bono at la panadería... he's using "on" as a synonym of "about". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:49, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

I don't understand your answer Bugs? Miss Bono ^[zootalk] 13:54, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

He's using "on" to mean "about the subject" rather than literally "on top of", like the book-on-the-table we discussed before. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:00, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Oh, yup! Sorry :) Miss Bono ^[zootalk] 14:03, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

And as for "losing you at the bakery", that's a joke from an old Rowan and Martin comic bit. Fairly obscure. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:23, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

• Heheh, I like Jack's answer. All three are correct, depending on context. ☯ Bonkers The Clown \(^_^)/ Nonsensical Babble ☯ 14:51, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Reżyseria

What's the English for this word? Is it Director? Miss Bono ^[zootalk] 20:11, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

According to wikt:reżyser, "reżyser" means "director", so perhaps "reżyseria" means "directorship".

—Wavelength (talk) 20:39, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Bing Translator says that it means "directed by", but perhaps we should wait for a real Polish speaker to comment. Alansplodge (talk) 23:33, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

According to wikt:direction, reżyseria means "direction" in the sense of "work of the director in cinema or theater". I'm sure Bing Translator is just going by the fact that where English-language movie credits say "Directed by: Roman Polanski", Polish-language movie credits say "Reżyseria: Roman Polański". Aɴɢʀ (talk) 13:42, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

As a native Polish speaker, I confirm what Angr wrote. — Kpalion^(talk) 01:45, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Thanks everyone! Miss Bono ^[zootalk] 12:17, 29 August 2013 (UTC)