Friday, July 20, 2012

English and its language

My mom was reading her watchtower magazine one day while she came across a word.  The paragraph read like this:

{Just Another Book?

"All Scripture is inspired of God and beneficial..., that the man of God may be fully competent, completely equipped for every good work."  ---2 Timothy 3:16,17.

Some people hesitate to make such an unqualified statement about the Bible....}


Now, she found that she could understand about the word, "unqualified".  So she immediately looked it up from a dictionary.  To her surprise, this word meant "absolute", "complete"!  When I got up that morning, she started to tell me about it.  I was surprised too.  So I looked it up again. And what do you know, one of the meaning of "unqualified", is "absolute", "complete".

When my sister was up, she asked about the word.  My sister read the paragraph, and then thought it meant "un-qualified".  My mom then revealed what she found out about the word.  But my sister did not really believe it, so she looked it up by herself.  She was confused afterwards and decided to as her husband.  When PQ came down the stairs, my sister asked him about the question.  My brother-in-law read the paragraph, and decided it was "un-qualified", rather than "absolute", or "complete".  And he added, the statement was not the one in the quotation mark, it was actually the title: Just Another Book?  Although my mom insisted that the statement was the ones in the quotation mark.  My sister started to waiver.  I was about 80% leaning towards my mom.  We decided to wait for the Chinese version came out.

The Chinese version was kind on the fence.  But it added more weight to my mom's case than PQ's.  I am completely convinced by my mom now.  She even went out to ask her sisters about this question.  It was to her surprise that none of her English-native-speaker sisters really understand the word, along the sentence.  All of them thought the word, "unqualified" meant "un-qualified", nobody thought of otherwise.  Even more surprised was that none of them felt the sentence was not making any senses before my mom mentioned it. 

It is official, English is not logical.  Because after this incident, there's another one.  This time the culprit is a word, "implicit".  Surely, this word is the opposite of "explicit", right?  Yes.  But that only half the meaning.  The other half of the meaning is..."absolute", or "complete"...  It is completely out of blue. English, is officially not logic...lol

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