Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Where would we be without Chambers?

I must look up purpose and pious.

In the wedding on Saturday, in his talk, the minister kept using the word purpose as a verb. It disturbed me greatly: can purpose be a verb? 'God purposed this.' Really? At the end of the service I turned to Nathan who was sitting behind me and is another grammar pedant and said, 'Purposed?'
'I know!' he said. 'I noticed that too.'

Let's see what Mr Chambers has to say.
Blow me down. vt to intend. Mr Pastor, I take it all back.

And pious. It's been used in Zac's recently as a derogatory term and that hasn't been my understanding of it. So once again it's to Mr Chambers I turn.
Piety is defined as dutifulness, devoutness, sense of duty while pious itself is defined as dutiful but it does have an alternative and less good meaning - professing to be religious.

I guess it's one of those words that the behaviour of those who claim to be it bring into disrepute.

3 comments:

Gledwood said...

You know my Chambers dictionary got STOLEN when I was living in a crackhouse. Must have been an intellectual crack addict.

Gledwood said...

Chambers dictionary, the biggest one they do, is the bestest single volume English dictionary out there.

And it probably doesn't include the word "bestest" (ahem)..!

Or for that matter "tonkie"

Gledwood said...

I scored 38 on a depression test this morning which means I'm "severely depressed". I took heroin this afternoon, which has put me in a far better mood. Sad I know. I don't know how I'm going to survive, Liz. I'm doing a course called Intuitive Recovery which is meant to be really good, so I'm looking forward to that tomorrow, but I felt like I stood out like a sore thumb, being so miserable and morose and unable to put on the bullshitty manner you probably see all the time when you're in prison you know the behaviour. You get the impression these are very capable young men if only they'd put their prodigious energies to something positive. Then there's me with 90% of the life sucked out of me looking like a deadbeat old junkie at the back. Ho hum well it's my fault for taking drugs I spose.