... are* death. Maybe not your death, but death nonetheless.
I'm currently staggering through Hollowed Out - A Warning About America's Next Generation by Jeremy Adams. I don't think I'm going to finish it and in fact, I'll probably return it to Audible and get my credit back. It's not dreadful, it's just not helpful.
Hollowed Out is one of those sunset pessimist books. Jeremy sees the sun going down and yells at us, "If this continues, we'll all freeze to death in total darkness in less than a year!" It's like the endless doom-mongering by the Global Warming Climate Change crowd. Yes, yes, I can see that things are changing, but nothing ever changes linearly forever. There is a hysteresis effect to nature and things will rebound in some way.
But what way?
Where does this all go? Jeremy tells us that kids these days can't concentrate, don't want to learn and are consumed with the modern zeitgeist of feelings uber alles. OK, I believe that, but what will be the result?
Yesterday's post showed me where at least part of this will go.
We could have sent in diplomats and negotiated a peace that would have allowed the fuel, food and fertilizer to continue to flow to the rest of the world. Instead, our own criminally ignorant and amoral Elites indulged in their post-Trump, psychotic obsession with Vladimir Putin and sent bombs instead. We've turned what should have been one of the last, pathetic adventures of two, dying, sclerotic countries into a worldwide holocaust of famine.
Moral pride has begotten objective ignorance. We don't need to learn from our classical past. We're all so much better than those people. Tear down their statues, remove their works from our curricula and have done with them all. We shall build a better world from scratch!
Pride is a sin, you know. The wages of that particular sin will be death, death in Africa.
Similarly, that same moral pride gave us racial justice. The wages of racial justice have been death in black neighborhoods.
More of that sweet, sweet moral pride got us open borders which will result in our working poor unable to earn higher wages. That's death of a kind.
So where does this end? Well, reality can't be held at bay forever. Africa will have its famine and blacks will continue to die at the end of a Planned Parenthood scalpel or an illiterate black's handgun. Our framing carpenters, painters, housekeepers and landscape maintenance men will see their standard of living drop. Eventually, a leader will come out who will loudly put the blame for this where it lies and the bubble of fake, moral superiority will be popped.
Ron DeSantis, perhaps? He seems up for a fight.
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| Greg Abbott busing illegals to NYC was an excellent move in this direction. It is reality popping the bubble of the sanctuary cities' lies about their moral superiority. |
* - I know the actual quote is, "The wages of sin is death," but I've always hated that formulation. "Wages" is plural. "Is" is singular. To put them together is itself a sin. In a just world, the people that do so should be put to death. Or at least sternly admonished.
10 comments:
=="* - I know the actual quote is, "The wages of sin is death," but I've always hated that formulation."==
"The past is a different country"
https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2012/08/wages-of-sin.html
==Why, you ask, does the plural noun take a singular verb in that excerpt from Romans 6:23? Because “wages” was often treated as singular in the past.
The Oxford English Dictionary has published references from the late 1300s to the 1700s of the plural noun construed as singular.
...
The word “wages” here, according to the OED, is being used figuratively to mean reward or recompense.==
I hope that this article is some hope for the future. I wonder how a rational person can refute any of it.
https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-new-founders-america-needs
I agree with your opinion of the plural nature of the noun ‘wages’. Sorry Ilion, I just can’t agree with your sources - and if that is dissatisfying, look up ‘woman’ or ‘gender’ or ‘recession’ and see if you agree with those. It is our duty to correct the dictionaries when they are wrong. It is not our duty to modify our speech/writing to conform with the dictionaries.
My favorite(?) grammar complaint is when people use ‘data’ as a singular noun. Now before anyone points out that today’s dictionaries say ‘data’ is plural, but in construction can be either plural or singular, to me that is just another indication of the decline of our civilization. Seriously, the singular is datum. The plural is data. If you want to refer to an ensemble, then it should be ‘data’ (plural) or ‘the set of data’ (singular). Also never ‘this data’ use either ‘this set of data’ or ‘these data’. Any ways, that’s my pet peeve.
O@H,
"For the wages (recompense) of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Or, "For 'X' is 'Y'" -- 'X' is thought by many to be plural, 'Y' is clearly singular. Is it really grammatical to say that a plural thing *is* a singular thing?
Ilion -
I suspect the fundamental issue here is, is “The wages of sin” a plural or a singular. There would be nothing to debate if it read “The wage of sin”. But it doesn’t. It clearly uses “wages” which is plural.
But as to your query:
“The players are the team.”
“The team is made of players.”
Clearly, in both cases ‘players’ is plural and ‘team’ is singular (note the verbs which agree the subjects of the sentence in singular and plural).
So, yes. A plural X can be associated with a singular Y. Just not with “is”. Which, if I recall correctly, was KT’s point in the first place.
I think a perfectly adequate blog could be written on grammar peeves, pet and otherwise. In fact, if I recall, I read some posts from one in the past.
==“The players are the team.”
“The team is made of players.”==
You doubtless don't see it, but you're using "is" in a different way here. "To be" is, after all, a very complex verb.
=="Clearly, in both cases ‘players’ is plural and ‘team’ is singular (note the verbs which agree the subjects of the sentence in singular and plural)."==
In America, we say, "The government is doing thus-and-such"; in Britain, they say, "The government are doing thus-and-such". In America, a business might say, "Our staff is here to assist you"; in Britain, a similar business would say, "Our staff are here to assist you";
Similarly, I expect the British they would say, "The team are made of players."
I agree, "... the wages of sin is death" sounds odd to our moderns (and merely half-educated) ears, but that has been the English formulation for at least 500 years.
=="... grammar peeves, pet and otherwise."==
I have so many.
Possibly, the one I loathe the most, is the misunderstanding of, and then absolutizing of that misunderstanding, the admonition to not begin every sentence with "I".
Thus, yesterday, I saw this on a FB group:
=="Have had an absolute blast returning to BSU campus this past week in order to begin instructing at the Miller College o' Business. Have already met a few Campus House students who may or may not yet know I am a has-been. Looking forward to a wonderful first semester and I am humbled that God's Spirit has led me to this wonderful challenge."==
I couldn't help myself ... I *had* to mock it (which will no doubt piss-off most people). This pseudo-humbleness of refusing to acknowledge to oneself is the subject of one's sentence annoys me no end.
If you change the "is" to "are" to go with the presuned plural of "wages", the phrase becomes "For the wages of sin are death, but ...". Does that sound right? No, it doesn't ... it seems to me that "death" may actually be the subject of the clause -- "For death is the wage[s] of sin"
=="For the wages of sin is death, ..."==
As I wrote previously, it seems to me that "death" is actuallt the subject of the clause. So, let's restate it in the normal SVO form:
1) For death is the wages of sin, ..."
2) For death is the wage of sin, ..."
Does 1) peeve you so much now?
But, let's try something else. As "wages" is being used in the sense of "just deserts", let's make that substitution:
1) For death is the just deserts of sin, ..."
2) For death is the just desert of sin, ..."
Would you even think to say 2)? While you *could* say that, you'd probably not, as "just deserts" is the form in which the phrase has fossilized.
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