From the Narrow Desert

I was listening to an audio recording of the Book of Mormon, and when it got to the part where Nephi says they "did live upon raw meat in the wilderness" (1 Ne. 17:2), I wondered how the word meat was to be understood. Certainly by Joseph's time it had already acquired its modern meaning of "animal flesh," but the language of the Book of Mormon is patterned after that of the King James Version of the Bible, which even in its time was very linguistically conservative. For example, even though the KJV was written in Shakespeare's day, and Shakespeare commonly uses singular ye/you after the French fashion, as a more formal or respectful alternative to thou/thee, the KJV follows the older Anglo-Saxon convention, in which ye/you is always plural and thou/thee is always used for the singular. (This is an extremely helpful feature of the KJV text, making it much less ambiguous than modern thou-phobic translations.) Joseph Smith mostly imitates the KJV, but imperfectly so, and there are many unambiguous instances of singular you in the Book of Mormon. Sometimes the two groups of second-person pronouns almost seem to be in free variation -- for example, "And now Zoram, I speak unto you: Behold, thou art the servant of Laban." (2 Ne. 1:30). Would even Shakespeare have countenanced singular you when addressing a servant?

In another case of its linguistic conservatism, the KJV always uses meat to mean "food" and never in the narrower sense of "animal flesh." How aware was Joseph Smith of that usage, and how closely did he follow it in the Book of Mormon? Need we imagine the Lehites chowing down on steak tartare, or did Nephi perhaps mean salad?

I'll post my conclusion on that question later, on my Book of Mormon blog. Here I just want to note a striking synchronicity occasioned by my preliminary research into it.

While the audio recording was still playing, I used my computer to search the Book of Mormon text for meat, then for food, and finally for flesh, trying to get a sense for how the text uses those words. Since the search function on the website formerly known as lds.org is unusably bad -- I believe "an abomination in the sight of the Lord" is the technical term -- I was doing Ctrl-F searches on a text file from Gutenberg. That means that rather than seeing a whole list of search results on the screen at once, I had to click through them one at a time.

When I clicked for the second search result for flesh, it was 1 Ne. 17:35:

Behold, the Lord esteemeth all flesh in one; he that is righteous is favored of God. But behold, this people had rejected every word of God, and they were ripe in iniquity; and the fulness of the wrath of God was upon them; and the Lord did curse the land against them, and bless it unto our fathers; yea, he did curse it against them unto their destruction, and he did bless it unto our fathers unto their obtaining power over it.

The exact instant I clicked, and the screen jumped to this verse with the word flesh highlighted in orange, the audio recording also said the word flesh -- and then I realized that it was reading this very verse! My curiosity had been piqued, you will recall, by 1 Ne. 17:2, and now the audio had gotten to verse 35. I had been listening with half my attention and skimming search results with the other, and now suddenly the two came together, and what I was reading on the screen was exactly the same as what the recording was saying.

This is similar in kind, though not in content, to the sync recently documented in "A loaf of bread is dear."

An attributive modifier such as an adjective can be restrictive or non-restrictive. For example, in such phrases as Holy Land and holy water, the modifier holy is restrictive; it restricts the scope of reference to a particular land and a particular type of water, in contrast to other lands and ordinary water. In Holy Bible and Holy Trinity, the same modifier is non-restrictive; Bible and Holy Bible have the same scope of reference. Holy does not specify a particular type of Bible but adds extra or parenthetical information -- "the Bible (which by the way is holy)."

Some languages mark restrictiveness with grammatical rules. For example, in Spanish, a restrictive adjective generally comes after the noun it modifies (e.g. Tierra Santa, agua bendida), while a non-restrictive one comes before it (e.g. Santa Biblia, Santísima Trinidad).

In English, restrictiveness is often grammatically unmarked. In appositives and relative clauses, non-restrictiveness is marked by the use of commas, and restrictiveness can optionally be marked by the use of that rather than which or who, but there are no corresponding rules for adjectives. Holy Land and Holy Bible have the same grammatical form, the only distinction being that in restrictive phrases like the former, the adjective is usually stressed (HOLY Land), while the noun is typically stressed in non-restrictive phrases (Holy BIBLE); there are many exceptions to this, though (e.g. Holy GHOST, cf. Spanish Espíritu Santo), and in any case the distinction is invisible in writing.

This is all by way of preface to a discussion of holy prophets, a phrase that appears four times in the New Testament and a whopping 26 in the Book of Mormon. I had always assumed that this was a non-restrictive honorific, analogous to putting Saint before a saint's name, but in my most recent reading of Abinadi's words in Mosiah, I noticed this verse. The context is that Abinadi is explaining Isaiah's statement that the Suffering Servant (understood to be Christ) "shall see his seed."

Yea, and are not the prophets -- every one that has opened his mouth to prophesy, that has not fallen into transgression -- I mean all the holy prophets ever since the world began -- I say unto you that they are his seed (Mosiah 15:13).

The standard Spanish version of the Book of Mormon has the non-restrictive santos profetas here, but I think profetas santos is surely correct. As mentioned above, relative clauses with that are always restrictive in English. "Every one that has opened his mouth to prophesy, that has not fallen into transgression" implies that not all have opened their mouths, and that some have fallen into transgression. Abinadi is singling out a subset of prophets -- namely, holy prophets, defined as those who have opened their mouths to prophesy and have not fallen into transgression -- and saying that they, and not prophets more generally, can be considered the metaphorical "seed" of the Suffering Servant. (It is somewhat odd that Isaiah twice emphasizes that the Servant "opened not his mouth," while Abinadi identifies the Servant's seed among the prophets as those who do open their mouths.)

Not all prophets are holy; in fact, it must be extraordinarily difficult to be a holy prophet. The first temptation is to keep quiet and not share the message -- like Jonah before the whale interrupted his plans, or Jeremiah before the fire shut up in his bones compelled him. For those who do speak out, the temptation is to use one's status as prophet for self-serving ends.

Sorry for the Satanic content. You know the media! I'm just in it for the grammar. (And no, I don't read USA Today. I saw this on The Secret Sun.)

Most of the solfeggio syllables we use today come from the first stanza of "Ut queant laxis," a medieval hymn to John the Baptist.

Ut queant laxis resonare fibris

Mira gestorum famuli tuorum,

Solve polluti labii reatum,

Sancte Iohannes!

As a young child, I had heard Ave Maria set to music, and I was aware that Catholics and football players prayed "Hail Mary," but for a surprisingly long time (maybe until I was 11 or 12?) I never made the connection between the two. Having been raised without any knowledge of Latin, I didn't know what ave meant, but I thought of it as likely meaning "grandmother" (because of Esperanto avo, "grandfather," which I correctly guessed was probably derived from Latin) or perhaps having something to do with birds (the class Aves). The relevance of birds was obscure, so I tended toward the former interpretation: Ave Maria probably meant something like "Grandmother Mary" -- as God's children might well address the woman called the "Mother of God." I never guessed that it simply meant "hail"!

Borrowed with an unspelled /h/ from Punic *ḥawe ("live!", 2sg. imp.), cognate to Hebrew חוה‎ ("Eve"), and as avō from Punic *ḥawū (2pl. imp.), from Semitic root ḥ-w-y (live).

And it came to pass after I had seen the tree [of life], I said unto the Spirit: I behold thou hast shown unto me the tree which is precious above all.

And he said unto me: What desirest thou?

And I said unto him: To know the interpretation thereof . . .

And it came to pass that he said unto me: Look! . . . And I beheld the city of Nazareth; and in the city of Nazareth I beheld a virgin, and she was exceedingly fair and white.

And it came to pass that I saw the heavens open; and an angel came down and stood before me . . . And he said unto me: Behold, the virgin whom thou seest is the mother of God . . . Knowest thou the meaning of the tree . . . ?

I've been reading some René Guénon essays, including one on the meaning of the Masonic letter G. He begins by dismissing the idea that the Roman letterform itself could have any special meaning, since unlike Hebrew and Greek, "modern languages" (like Latin!) are devoid of sacred significance.

In my November 23 Magician's Table post "Four rams' heads," I discussed Amun in his character as Zeus Ammon and particularly as the four-headed Ram of Mendes (Banebdjedet), and I mentioned ancient coins that depicted a horned Alexander.

Alexander the Great, a prototype of the "emperor" figure, was supposed to be the son of Zeus Ammon, and ancient coins depict him with ram's horns. (The personage called the "two-horned man" in the Quran is generally believed to be Alexander.)

On November 26, Chris Knowles at The Secret Sun (who I'm pretty sure does not read my blogs) posted "He Walks Ammon Us: Egypt's Restoration Ritual at Luxor," writing that

the big daddy of the gods is Amun, AKA Jupiter Ammon, AKA Banebdjedet, AKA Baphomet, AKA you name it. All the same thing, really: the Horned and Hidden God of kings and conquerors.

If you're wondering about the Baphomet connection, the modern goat-headed Baphomet figure (as opposed with the severed head supposedly worshiped by the Templars) was invented by Éliphas Lévi and associated by him with the "Goat of Mendes" -- i.e., Herodotus's distorted account of Banebdjedet, who was properly the Ram of Mendes. Knowles goes on to mention Alexander as the "two-horned man" of the Quran, and then he offers this interpretation of "Ye cannot serve God and Mammon."

This is another one of those hiding-in-plain-sight kind of deals that eluded scholars looking for something more contrived. But it's very simple: Jupiter Ammon was on all the coinage that Jesus and the Apostles would have been familiar with. It was rendered "Mammon" as was typical of the transliteration of the time.

Well, no, I don't think adding a random M to the beginning was "typical of the transliteration of the time." Nor is it true that "Jupiter Ammon was on all the coinage" in Jesus' time. When Jesus held up a Roman denarius and asked, "Whose is this image and superscription?" they answered, "Caesar's." I have looked at many pictures of denarii from the reign of Tiberius, but none of them feature the horns of Ammon. But even if some of them did have horns, it's pretty clear that Jesus and his contemporaries thought of the bloke on the coins as "Caesar," not "(M)ammon."

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In my post "John, the Bear Witness," I connected John the Baptist with the Great Bear constellation and mentioned that pun I used as a title: It is said in the Fourth Gospel that John came "to bear witness." The Greek word for "bear witness" is marturese (whence martyr), and it occurred to me that if you dropped the initial letter, it looked a lot like Arthur or Arcturus ("bear" names both) -- but the connection is a stretch even by my standards, so I didn't mention it in the post. Later I find Knowles doing exactly the same thing, even the same letter.

Actually, come to think of it, Arabic at least does form words by prefixing m- to a root (Muslim from Islam, maktab from kataba, etc.). Is there anything similar in Hebrew or Aramaic? (A pseudo-example from English would be meat, originally meaning "food," from eat.)

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After writing part of this post, I had to go to work. While on the road, I was thinking about the idea of a horned god and how it contrasted with the Elizabethan use of horns as a symbol of cuckoldry and a mark of shame. I remembered how back in 2020 Francis Berger had posted a photo of himself sitting in front of a deer-antler trophy so that he appeared to have antlers coming out of his head, and how I had commented about the Elizabethan meaning of such. This led me to thinking about the white stag and how Frank had adopted it as a sort of personal symbol.

Just then I turned a corner and saw that a new billboard had been put up -- showing an enormous white stag with a crow or raven perched on either antler. So, that was weird.

Looking up Frank's old post now, I find (which I had not remembered!) that in the comments we even talk about rams' horns, Jupiter Ammon, and Alexander the Great.

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Note added Dec. 2: I asked one of my staff to put something Christmassy on the small blackboard in front of our school. I didn't say anything more specific than that, but by chance she decided to make a drawing centered on a large white pair of antlers.

I was creating illustrations for a children's phonics book, the bit about the a-consonant-e spelling of the "long a" sound. Since this is hardly work that fully engages my brain, I was at the same time listening to the Bible read aloud, as I have been doing on and off recently. (I started with Genesis back in August and have got as far as Jeremiah.)

I had already prepared a list of 20 words, in truly-random order courtesy of random.org. As it happened, the word grapes had been put in first place, with gate in second.

As I started drawing some grapes, Jeremiah said, "He shall give a shout, as they that tread the grapes, against all the inhabitants of the earth" (25:30).

As I was illustrating the word gate, Jeremiah said, "Then they came up from the king's house unto the house of the Lord, and sat down in the entry of the new gate of the Lord's house" (26:10).

Well, obviously that kind of thing can't continue for very long. Even the synchronicity fairies have to respect the laws of probability! I did the next dozen or so illustrations without any prophetic counterpoint.

The 16th word on my list was blaze. No sooner had I begun sketching the flames of a massive conflagration than Jeremiah chimed in: "And the Chaldeans shall come again, and fight against this city, and take it, and burn it with fire" (37:8).

(Next after blaze came the name Dave -- but, alas, Jeremiah's last reference to David was back in 36:30, just 10 verses before the burning with fire.)

I don't think these kinds of synchronicities mean anything in particular in terms of their specific content; I just take them as a general sign that I'm on the right track, in touch with the harmony of Creation.

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Having had Jeremiah 25:30 brought to my attention, I'm wondering now: Why should shouting be proverbially associated with treading the grapes? Is this a reference to some long-forgotten agricultural custom or pagan ritual? A more likely interpretation, I think, is that "treading the grapes" would have been understood by Jeremiah's contemporaries as a kenning-like way of referring to the bloodshed of war, and that the reference is to the war-cry of soldiers going into battle. We see something similar in Revelation 19:15, where smiting the nations with a sharp sword is juxtaposed with treading "the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God." The metaphor may in ancient times have been such a stereotyped one that "soldiers" came to be the primary meaning of they that tread the grapes -- just as for us bloodletting now has "violent bloodshed" as its primary meaning, although this was originally a metaphorical use of a word that referred primarily to a now-obsolete medical procedure.

I can't believe I failed to connect this:

In Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and many other languages the word for "spirit" and "breath" (and often "wind" as well) is the same. (We can see this in our English words spirit and respiration, from the same Latin root.) "Breath," being more concrete, was presumably the original meaning of these words, with "spirit" being a metaphorical extension of that sense.

Why that particular metaphor?

One obvious reason is that breath is one of the things that distinguishes a living person from a corpse, and that we also encounter it (as wind) in disembodied form. It is easy to imagine a person's breath -- more so than, say, his heartbeat -- living on as a disembodied being after that person's death. Perhaps the earliest imagined "spirits" in the superhuman sense -- proto-gods -- were such characters as Boreas, Zephyrus, Notus, and Eurus -- invisible, obviously real, and clearly of the same nature as human breath.

Another possible reason is that breath is the medium of speech -- which is really only modulated breath -- and it is speech that expresses our thoughts and feelings. In fact, there is a case to be made (others have made it, though I don't remember who) that speech is what originally gave rise to our self-awareness -- that we spoke to others, overheard ourselves, and thus began to know ourselves. Silent self-overhearing, like silent reading, came only later. The Bible describes thinking as a kind of internal speaking: "The fool hath said in his heart. . . ."

Most appropriately, though, breath is volitional but only potentially so. Our heartbeat is beyond out conscious control, but we can easily control our breathing if we choose to do so. Most of the time we do not, though, and it goes on automatically. I think something similar is true of our thoughts and the behavior that comes from them. We have free will but use it far less often than we imagine, and I think it is possible in principle to live out one's life without ever once exercising it, just allowing one's thoughts and actions to happen -- "tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind" (Eph. 4:14). But we can live differently. The kingdom of heaven -- meaning, if we take it in a stupidly literal sense, the realm of the wind-gods -- is within you.

Some months ago, I recorded a vivid fantasy in which I saw the Homeric heroes Ajax and Epicles fighting under a blue sun and noted that this would explain Homer's famous "wine-dark sea."

Homer's "wine-dark sea" seems bizarre to us moderns, for whom wine is red and the sea is blue. Under a blue sun, though, the sea would not look any bluer than anything else, and "red" -- reflecting less blue light than any other visible color -- would be a close cousin to "dark."

Obviously, I don't really believe the Sun was ever blue, though, so Homer's sea remains a mystery.

Homeric Greek (like several other languages) apparently only had four basic color words -- black, white, red, and yellow. Of the four, black is obviously the best fit for the color of the sea, and arguably for "red" wine as well. (The color of tea is similarly ambiguous. The sort of tea that is called "black" in English is called "red" in Chinese.)

Basically red, or basically black?

So it's not surprising at all that Homer would use the same color word -- black -- to describe both wine and the sea. Still, "wine-dark" is surprising. Many languages consider pink a shade of red and would call a pink piglet "red" -- but would they ever call it blood-red? Even if piglets and blood are both "red" in some languages, a piglet obviously isn't the color of blood and would never be described that way. We can see something similar in English. In Old English, as in modern Russian, there was a basic distinction between light blue (Russian голубой) and dark blue (Russian синий), similar to the distinction between pink and red. Modern English uses blue (originally meaning "light blue") for both -- but sky-blue is still used exclusively for things that are light blue like the sky, not dark blue like the sea. Homer's calling the sea "wine-dark" is precisely as strange as a modern English speaker calling it "sky-blue."

On the other hand, there's my wife, who (like my father) is incapable of distinguishing certain shades of blue (that of my eyes, for instance) from gray. At first I thought this was purely a linguistic phenomenon -- that she applied the label blue to a somewhat different range of colors than I did. Once, though, we were arguing over whether a particular blanket was blue (as it very obviously was!) or gray, and I said, "When I say gray, I mean the color of a mouse. Look at that blanket. Could a mouse be that color?" And she insisted that, yes, a mouse could be that color!

Grey as a mouse?

Blackboard art by one of my employees

For example, consider this passage in Genesis (24:2-3, 9).

And Abraham said unto his eldest servant of his house, that ruled over all that he had, Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh: and I will make thee swear by the Lord, the God of heaven, and the God of the earth, that thou shalt not take a wife unto my son of the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell: but thou shalt go unto my country, and to my kindred, and take a wife unto my son Isaac. . . . And the servant put his hand under the thigh of Abraham his master, and sware to him concerning that matter.

This may strike us today as funny, disgusting, indecent, or just bizarre, but that's how things were done in those days. You solemnized an oath by putting your hand not on a Bible (Bibles hadn't been invented yet) but on the party of the second part's you-know-what! Traces of this once prevalent practice can be found in such modern words as testify, testament, and testimony -- linguistic fossils attesting (so to speak!) to the connection, once taken for granted, between solemn oaths and the testicles.

Here's another example, from Exodus (33:11).

And the Lord spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend.

That's right, as disgusting, dangerous, and downright selfish as it seems to us today, in ancient times it was acceptable and even expected for friends -- friends, not enemies! -- to speak face to face, without even wearing masks. What today would convey the message "I hope you get sick and die" was in those days actually seen as a token of esteem and intimacy. We can see linguistic "fossil" evidence of this, too, in such terms as Facebook and FaceTime, dating back to an era when seeing another person's face was actually seen as a positive good!

It is with this cultural context in mind that we must interpret all the seemingly blasphemous references in the Bible to "seeking the face" of the Lord. We must remember that in those benighted days, before even the germ theory of disease had been discovered, let alone the importance of masks and social distancing, "face" had a very different connotation. The face was not then seen primarily as a disease vector which all decent people keep covered up, but simply as another part of the body. Seeking the "face" of the Lord simply meant to seek his presence. We can find a partial parallel in such modern colloquialisms as "Get your ass over here!" in which, without necessarily implying anything unseemly, a rather dirty and indecent part of the body is used synecdochically to refer to the person himself.

Hopefully these little notes have helped to shed light on some of the Old Testament's "hard sayings." We must keep in mind that, no matter how far we may have progressed since Bible times in terms of scientific knowledge and standards of decency, the spiritual message of the Bible remains relevant today!

Well, fuckaroo!

Sonembitch

My God, Rollo, Rollie boy, hey, you are one sinister sonembitch.

-- a story anthologized in Murder in the Family, 2002

Bats. In your belfry, squeaking like sonembitches 

-- 2012: The War for Souls, 2007

Tough sonembitches.

I've never liked executions. Some poor dumb sonembitch, every damn time.

-- Hybrids, 2011

He's a smart sonembitch.

-- The Wild, 2015

"It'd ruin somebody's day, for sure."

"The God-for-damned enemy's day"

-- 2012: The War for Souls, 2007

Hideous stuff [absinthe], but it did pack a pop. He got it out now, unscrewed the bottle, and chug-a-lugged.

Fuckaroo.

He went down to dinner, and ate in silence.

"This man isn't dead! This man is breathing!"

. . . "Fuckaroo, he's right."

1. out of a sincere and heartfelt love of the absurd
2. as a specimen of the sort of hyper-verbal dream I often have, but which I believe is fairly rare in the population at large
3. as a warning to myself, in my ongoing Bible-commentary project, not to get so caught up in my own exegetical ingenuity that I lose the thread
4. in the hope that Paul somebody will somehow find this post, perhaps by googling the title of his own paper, and have a really surreal experience (which will be compounded, of course, when he reads this note at the end)

I tend to be a very verbal dreamer, sometimes even having "radio" dreams with no visual content at all. Last night my sleeping mind revealed to me the mysteries of orangeness.

The dream began with a sort of half-verbal, awe-filled brooding over the fact -- and a singularly momentous fact it seemed! -- that the orang-outang (for the dream used this archaic, or French or Dutch, spelling) is an orange animal, and that its name includes almost the whole word orange, despite the two words being completely etymologically unrelated! If that doesn't just blow your mind, well, that's probably a sign that you're not asleep.

I, however, was asleep, and my mind was suitably blown. But then it became even blown-er as a voice explained (for the dream had now become fully verbal) that the word orang-outang actually contained parts of not one but three similarly colored fruits: the orange, the mango, and the tangerine. It just doesn't get any deeper than this, folks!

Move over, bananas, coconuts, and grapes!

By then, the voice was on a roll, and further revelations about the deep, mind-blowing appropriateness of the English names of various orange-colored things came so quickly that I've only been able to remember a few of them. Here, for the benefit of posterity, they are:

Another orange fruit is the mandarine -- incorporating parts of mango and tangerine. Yet another orange fruit, the nectarine, is also clearly akin to mandarine and tangerine.

The name of the orange tiger harmonizes with tangerine and nectarine, and the orangutan's fellow orange-furred primate, the golden lion tamarin obviously has a name which is a portmanteau of tangerine and mandarine.

The main points should be clear by now: (1) the names of many orange things have many of the same letters, in the same order, as the names of other orange things, and (2) that's, like, deep.

Another, somewhat independent, family of orange things is represented by the pumpkin and persimmon, and perhaps a few other things I've forgotten. (These are not entirely independent from the others, though, as there are pumpkin-mandarine and persimmon-tangerine links.) The carrot and cantaloupe form another semi-independent group.

Finally, I remember that the voice noted that tan -- as in tangerine -- is a color closely akin to orange, especially in its dihydroxyacetone "spray tan" variant -- which Donald Trump used to use, and which has made him permanently "orange" in the minds of many. The real reason, the "orange" label has stuck, of course, is that the name Trump is made up of the tr of tiger and tangerine and the ump of pumpkin, with a hint of cantaloupe to boot.

Now you know.

The Tetragrammaton ("four-letter word") is the proper name of the God of the Hebrews, spelt yod-he-waw-he, and supposed never to be pronounced. Observant Jews, when reading aloud from the Bible, replace the Tetragrammaton with "my Lord," "the Name," or some similar expression. In keeping with this custom, English Bibles generally replace it with "the Lord."

How might the Tetragrammaton be transliterated in the modern Roman alphabet? "YHWH," reflecting the hypothesized ancient Hebrew pronunciation of those letters, has become conventional, but here's another approach.

Yod, the first letter of the name, is genetically related to I and J. Because yod is the 10th letter of the Hebrew alphabet, we prefer J, the 10th letter of the Roman alphabet, as the closest equivalent. He is genetically related to E, and each is the 5th letter of its respective alphabet. Waw is genetically related to five different Roman letters: F, U, V, W, and Y. But because waw is the 6th letter of the Hebrew alphabet, our preferred equivalent is F, the 6th letter of the Roman alphabet. Thus the Tetragrammaton is rendered JEFE.

Jefe, as it happens, is a word in Spanish, meaning "chief, head, leader, boss" -- astonishingly close in meaning to the conventional substitute "Lord." But, as in English, grammar demands the use of the definite article -- el Jefe, "the Chief" -- and El happens to be another of the Hebrew names for God!

In fact, Spanish Bibles generally use el Señor for the Tetragrammaton. It's a pity that such a perfect equivalent was passed up.

George Orwell's Newspeak was in many ways prophetic of modern politically correct language, but he made two important errors. First, Orwell's Newspeak used crime in compound words (crimethink, crimestop, etc.) to indicate anything that was beyond the pale, whereas Nowspeak has found hate to be more effective for that purpose. Second, Orwell defined goodsex as "sexual intercourse only for procreation" and sexcrime as "sexual intercourse for pleasure" -- implying, to put it mildly, values somewhat different from those currently endorsed by real-world totalitarianism. So, in the spirit of updating and correcting Orwell, I offer this addition to the PC lexicon:

hatelove: biologically natural relations between a man and a woman within the bounds of marriage


It's a felicitous enough coinage, I think you'll agree, capturing something of the spirit of blackwhite ("the ability to believe that black is white, to know that black is white, and to forget that one ever believed the contrary") -- but, you might ask, what is actually so hateful about hatelove?

Glad you asked.

1. Being disproportionately practiced by privileged white people, hatelove is inherently racist and elitist. Furthermore, its procreative aspect (see 3 below) means that it leads to the production of more people of the hatelovers' own race and class, something only a white supremacist would want to do. In essence, hatelove boils down to a deliberate act of genocide directed against the Other.

2. Hatelovers may use the "consenting adults" excuse to argue that their predilections are their own business, but in fact each and every hatelove relationship contributes to the cancer of toxic heteronormativity. Heteronormativity is (as Studies Have Shown) one of the leading causes of suicide, so in a way hatelove is a kind of murder.

3. Worst of all, hatelove is known to produce fetuses -- parasitic and often dangerous growths which, conveniently enough, never affect white cisgender men. This makes hatelove a form of misogynistic and transphobic violence. Moreover, each fetus thus engendered will, if (foolishly and irresponsibly) allowed to develop to maturity, go on to release as much as 30 tons of deadly carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere, thus directly contributing to the destruction of the planet.

If that's not hate, what is?