I read recently that the English language contains about 250,000 words. That’s a quarter of a million. Wow! I wonder if "antidisestablishmentarianism" is still the longest word?

Do you ever wonder how many words you know? I am in awe of kids in spelling bee contests when they put the letters together for some obscure word I couldn’t define let alone spell. I suppose there is a test somewhere that can give you a good estimate of your vocabulary. If I had to guess about myself, I’d be happy to settle for 1% of those 250 thousand words. As I think about it, I’m not at all sure I even know 2500 different words.

The vocabulary issue quietly winds its way through our schools and churches. In order to make ourselves more generic and palatable, we often seek to dumb down vocabularies. In the church we now have a "gathering space" instead of a "narthex. Liturgical robes are finished off with a rope and not a cincture. The temptation is everywhere to remove specialized words and replace them with common words. Who knows, maybe the day will come when we can fit English into a two page memo. Ah, that would sure be a shame.

Side bar: Executive Secretary Sue Nitz tells me that the longest word in the English language is now some technical medical term that has more syllables than antiestablishmentarianism has letters. So let me finish this discussion with the word I absolutely know is the longest word in any language. The word is "smiles." There is a mile between the esses.

Keep smiling!

Pastor B.

Someone once said that there is nothing more worthless than the half-time score of a basketball game. I’d have to agree. Maybe an occasional high school game will predict the end by revealing the middle, but you won’t find many college or professional basketball games that won’t be close and exciting in the last half.

Have you been paying much attention to the political race for the presidency? Nowhere is our national love affair with polls more evident. Polling has become much more scientific and reliable since the days when Harry Truman was declared the loser by newspapers in the 1948 election (for you younger folks, he actually won). Still, it has its drawbacks, especially over the distance of time.

With a few exceptions, polling has become so sophisticated that a random poll today will pretty much faithfully predict an election tomorrow. But the more time you put between poll and election the more inaccurate it all becomes. In fact, it becomes almost bogus - as worthless as the half-time score of a basketball game.

Which gets me back to the presidential race. Pollsters, no doubt needing to justify their desk space, constantly pit two candidates against each other and ask, "If the election were today, whom would you vote for?" The answer provides fodder for political conversation to which we listen even though it has all the importance of a half-time score.

On it goes despite my objections. Commentators need to earn their keep, I suppose. Even though the political chatter falls pretty much into the same category as celebrity watch chit-chat, we do listen to both.

I think I’ll take a poll. Who will run for president in 2016? Go ahead. Take a guess. It’s just a half-time score.

Pastor B.

Dear mom,

It’s Mother’s Day week. The big day was yesterday. When Bell Telephone was the only communications game in town, we would all talk about Mother’s Day being the busiest phone day of the year. Indeed, I can remember friends trying to call home who would be met by a recorded message saying all lines were busy.

I was one of those second Sunday in May phone callers. Before cell phones did away with the concept of a long distance call, I called home in the afternoon no matter where I was.

Well anyway, mom, now another Mother’s Day has come and gone without a phone call in seven years. Not that I wouldn’t love to. I still have the number memorized. But you are gone.

I have a cell phone now, mom. If you were alive I’d call a lot more often ‘cause I wouldn’t be worrying about the long distance charges or waiting until 9:00 p.m. when the rates would drop. Just as well, I suppose. You were never much of a chatterbox on the phone. Still, I could have called just to say hello or to get help with the crossword puzzle.

If you haven’t figured it out, I miss you. Happy Mother’s Day.

Love,

Dave

Like many folks here in the northern plains of the United States, I enjoy touting my Scandinavian heritage. My father was Swedish and my mother was Danish with a smudge of Norwegian. (For those of you with a smattering of Lutheran American history, my mom was a happy Dane.)

Although I’ve never acquired a taste for lutefisk, I did learn to enjoy Swedish sausage. I still can visualize the vacuous look on the butcher’s face when I asked for Swedish sausage the Christmas I spent in Albany, New York on internship. At that point in time no one east of Toledo had ever heard of a brat either.

But I digress. Scandianian cuisine is a pretty thin book.

Today a European bloodline makes for open doors and quick acceptance in most of America. That wasn’t always true. Italians often met with resistance as they stepped upon American soil and ethnic code names like "wop" were quickly attached with prejudice. Catholics were ostracized. In the years before our Civil War, the "Know Nothing" political party rallied the populace around a fear of foreigners, especially if they did not speak English. The "Know Nothings" eventually morphed into the Klu Klux Klan and grew into an anonymous gang preaching hatred for anyone not white and protestant. The KKK particularly enjoyed taking aim at black Americans in the south where de facto discrimination all but protected them from prosecution.

Realizing that my ancestors were once immigrants becomes important to me as our country struggles with another immigration. I’ve heard enough talk radio and read enough e-mails to know that the truth is hidden by hate, fear, and prejudice. Truth is bent, twisted, and reconditioned into something cooked up to increase our fear.

And what exactly do we fear? As far as I can tell, we fear a language that isn’t English. Spanish leaves us out of the loop and in the dark. We insist that if it’s not English it must be bad. So, we get all tied up in tightening border security and building fences (it’s actually a wall).

It’s been a while now since I’ve been fortunate enough to travel through Europe. But when I was there a few years ago, I was struck by the fact that the border crossings are now wide open. There isn’t even a guard there.

So, I wonder what would happen if we relaxed our borders instead of sealing them tighter and tighter. Maybe we would not only look friendlier, maybe we would actually become less fearful, less prejudicial, and more open to those who may not share our language, but most certainly share our humanity.

Pastor B.

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