Author Topic: We hear and obey...  (Read 1721 times)

rogue_mother

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We hear and obey...
« on: October 11, 2007, 12:59:41 PM »
My daughter sent me an email concerning a contest in The Spectator, a British weekly, in which contestants were invited to rewrite the Ten Commandments.  The winners appeared toady (Wednesday, 10th October 2007).  One of them seemed to be speaking directly to Chi fans:

Mind your language
1. Thou shalt have no other sources but the OED.
2. Thou shalt not make printed images of any version of Holy Writ save that which is the Authorised Version, insomuch as modern translations clarify not, but have a vile sound withal.
3. Thou shalt not take the name of anything in vain, but shalt get it right.
4. Remember the subjunctive, to keep it wholly.
5. Honour thy mother tongue, that Shakespeare turn not in his grave.
6. Thou shalt not text, which killeth the language.
7. Thou shalt not steal words from foreign tongues, for who now remembereth what perestroika meaneth?
8. Thou shalt not adulterate the language with neologisms which confound the Greek with the Latin, even unto the word television.
9. Thou shalt not bear false syntax: let thy verbs be verbs and thy nouns be nouns.
10. Thou shalt not abandon words like covet, that thy vocabulary be not as that of a retarded gibbon.

Brian Murdoch

The entire results can be viewed at http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/diversions/247651/decalogue.thtml
Inside the Beltway, Washington, DC metropolitan area

Alan W

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Re: We hear and obey...
« Reply #1 on: October 11, 2007, 01:55:28 PM »
Some of those are quite funny, RM.

Chi doesn't keep all of those commandments, for example 7 and 8. (Although perestroika is too long for us, our word list does include glasnost.)
Alan Walker
Creator of Lexigame websites