Trump Slammed for Not Reciting Creed at Funeral

TRUMP SLAMMED FOR NOT RECITING CREED AT FUNERAL

Fri. Dec. 7th, 2018

A headline said Trump has been criticized for not reciting the creed at the funeral of President Bush the Elder (his middle initials can go jump in the lake; I regard them not).  I thought I would comment on that.  I'm going to take the discussion in a partly non-religious direction.

The president we have is the most un-intellectual president we've had in my lifetime.  I would put him up against President Reagan in that department.  I think the reason he didn't recite the creed at President Bush's funeral has nothing to do with religion.  I think it's because the creed is too hard for him to pronounce.

Pronouncing a long string of words at the same time everybody else in the room is pronouncing them is a difficult feat for many people.  I have changed my mind about pronunciation.  When I was a young linguist, I figured other linguists were right when they claimed or assumed that people get good at pronouncing their native language, because they get so much practice at it.  We speak our native language every day.  But I have changed my mind.  I have decided that English is hard to pronounce, even for native speakers.  But I'm going beyond that.  I now think that every human language is hard to pronounce, even for people who speak it every day.  It's a miracle that there are any people at all who can chatter rapidly and confidently in their own language, like the radio disk jockeys who are the most fun to listen to.

Think about it.  The Pledge of Allegiance is hard for people to learn.  The creed is longer than the pledge.  ("The creed" is a polite and reasonable abbreviation for "any of the various creeds which are in existence."  The Apostles' Creed is longer than the pledge, and the Nicene Creed is longer than the Apostles' Creed.  I don't know which creed they recited at President Bush's funeral.)  You don't have to memorize the creed.  It's written on a piece of paper which is in front of you when you're at church.  You just read it off the paper.  That's still hard for a lot of people.

I had an Episcopal friend who said "Episcopalians must think God likes to be read to."  I thought that was funny.  I grew up in the Episcopal Church, and I'm back in it now.  We Episcopalians read a lot of prayers out of a book in church.  I don't think God likes to be read to, but I do think it is good for me to read wholesome sentences about God out of a book over and over and over again until I die.  By the time an Episcopalian gets to be my age, he or she has fragments of the most common worship services floating around in his or her brain.  But the flip side of that is Episcopalians are a minority within Christians.  A story handed down in the Episcopal side of my family has two Episcopalians (one of them a college president) observing a church full of Baptists getting out.  The college president turns to her friend and observes "Baptists are so plentiful."

The point is that reading a lot of stuff out loud out of a book, in unison with a bunch of other people, is too troublesome for most believers.  And we all know what Jesus would say about that: the ones who are not good at reading have AT LEAST as good a chance of getting into heaven as the good readers!  We all know that.  I wouldn't say God likes to be read to, but God does hear the same stuff from Episcopalians over and over.  God simply has to be patient with Episcopalians.

This ties in with acronyms.  I hate acronyms, but everybody else loves them.  The reason people love acronyms is that they're easy to pronounce.  Try pronouncing a three-letter acronym out loud, and then pronounce a three-syllable ordinary word out loud.  Which is easier to pronounce?  Here are some to practice on.

            Acronyms                                            Ordinary Words

            you ess ay                                            digital

            you en cee                                           computer

            ay bee cee                                            acronym

            ell bee jay (a good president)              president

           

See what I mean?  A couple of generations ago the linguist Otto Jespersen said (if I remember rightly) that English words are short and manly, like length and strength.  But people would rather say ay bee cee dee ee eff gee than say The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.

In conclusion, I think that the people who are good at pronouncing their native language are actually in the minority.  I think those people are fun to listen to, but we can't all be like that.  Actually, that was just my first conclusion.  The real and final conclusion is, I don't mind the President keeping silent while the creed is being recited.  I'm sure it's a reflection on his tongue, not on his heart (assuming that the heart is the part of your body God writes things on).  You can't persuade me otherwise.

Frank Newton