English First: How to Not Talk Like a Christian Yuppie

By Pan Troglodytes

Communicating the importance of proper diction for Christians, in English First, author Pan Troglodytes provides a guide for learning to talk and write like a humble Christian, in American English. Using both the Bible and the dictionary as resources, Troglodytes shows how to avoid using vogue words, jargon, redundancies, and other overly contrived, complicated, or awkward words that make people look pretentious, conceited, ignorant, and foolish.

English First provides a host of examples to help speakers and writers keep their speech and writing plain and simple. It discusses misuses and mispronunciations of words and explains their true meaning and use in American English. For example, the word heinous is pronounced haynus, not heenus. Th e word comprise means includes, consists of, or contains; it does not mean makes up. The whole comprises its partsthe parts make up or compose the whole.

In addition to coaching Christians to speak correctly and simply, English First provides an interpretation of words, phrases, and passages in the Bible that speak to todays issues of abortion, homosexuality, and corporal punishment in child rearing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Abbott Press
• Release date: Jun 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9781458204431

Pan Troglodytes

Pan Troglodytes is a nobody who lives nowhere and has achieved nothing of significance.

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Copyright © 2012 by Pan Troglodytes.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN: 978-1-4582-0442-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4582-0443-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012910347

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Scripture taken from the New King James Version. Copyright 1979, 1980, 1982 by Thomas Nelson, inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

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Abbott Press rev. date: 06/25/12

Contents

Introduction

Class for the Masses

Prime Suspects

Final Word

Disclaimer

How to Read the Bible

Defend the Foundation

Trivia

Bibliography

To Jesus Christ, to my wife, Ann, to my parents.

If you speak English, please speak it properly. If you’re a Christian, please speak it correctly and humbly. Please stop the fancy-word buffoonery. You’re not a dummy; don’t talk and write like one.

Introduction

Verbal Advantage Success Edition CDs are a vocabulary-building tool by Charles Harrington Elster. The set used to cost $300, but now you can get it for $140. The CDs seem to be marketed specifically to business types who want to make a good first impression, climb the ladder of success, and become executives of major companies, but they can help anyone who wants to speak and write English with clarity, precision, and finesse.

Verbal Advantage is organized into ten levels of increasing difficulty. To the educated person, the first few or even several levels may seem too easy. You’ll be tempted to say, Oh, this is stupid. This program is for dummies. I already know most of these words. Patience. You may know, or think you know, most of the words, but when Elster gives you the exact definition and pronunciation, you may occasionally be surprised. With most words, he gives you synonyms, antonyms, and other related words, so there are additional opportunities to learn new words. Finally, throughout the entire program, he gives you pearls of wisdom on how to avoid common errors in pronunciation and word usage, and I think that this is the most important part for Christians.

This is not just about learning a bunch of hard words and throwing them at people. That would be pretentious and annoying. Even Mr. Elster warns against using Verbal Advantage to show off. Yes, it’s fun to play with new words, like playing with new toys. Yes, Brobdingnagian is a fancy word for gigantic, and osculation is a fun way of saying the act of kissing. A friend of mine with a penchant for violence learned the word defenestrate (to throw out the window) all by himself. He had a mischievous grin the rest of the week. Most of us have one or more friends who talk a lot. They have diarrhea of the mouth. You couldn’t shut them up if you stapled their lips together. Yes, you can have some fun with them and call them deipnosophists (wise dinner conversationalists). But I can’t remember most of the difficult words, and that’s okay. Every few years I can listen to the program again and try to pick up a few more.

Why do I think that avoiding mistakes in diction is most important for Christians? It’s true that many mistakes—like saying, I could care less instead of "I could not care less"—aside from just showing off our stupidity, probably won’t hurt our witness for Christ much, if only because the majority of stupid Americans are making similar blunders. (If you could care less, then you still care, and that’s the opposite of what you want to say, which is that you don’t care at all, and therefore you could not care less. I once read a military book written by a supposed Ivy League man. The author wrote I could care less multiple times. I don’t know who I was more disappointed in—the author, the editor, or the proofreader. That’s embarrassing.) But certain errors, especially involving the misuse of vogue words, can make you look proud, vain, stuck-up, conceited, haughty, arrogant, obnoxious, pompous, pretentious, bombastic, and ostentatious, as well as foolish, and that’s not how we want to be perceived. (I have heard and read the word prideful being used a few times. Prideful is an adjective, but so is the word proud. If a simple, humble word like proud is more than adequate, then prideful sounds like an overly contrived and complicated version. Try to use the word proud instead of prideful, or use a synonym like one of the above.)

But He gives more grace. Therefore He says, God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. (James 4:6)

Class for the Masses

Before we get to what I think are the most egregious examples of vogue words that, if you’re using them, make you look and sound like a pretentious dummy, let me entice you with some things that I have learned, or relearned, by listening to Verbal Advantage.

The word personable is now used to mean friendly, sociable, and amiable, and that is the only definition in my