Vort

From Page 1 in the leftist playbook: If you ever get into a situation where you simply cannot deny the overwhelming bias from the Left, admit it only by insisting that both sides are guilty. Never, ever, ever admit unilaterally that your side is wrong. Remember the brave actions of famous Lefist columnist Ellen Goodman, who, when confronted with undeniable proof that the feminist icon Lorena Bobbitt had inarguably attacked and maimed a helpless man (her husband), danced gracefully around the issue by stating, "A pox on both their houses." (Bobbitt, you will recall, actually dodged all responsibility for her act by way of an insanity plea, a brilliant tactical maneuver.)

From my extremely limited interaction with mormondialogue.org, it seems they don't care too much about enforcing their site rules.

This is exactly the kind of human reasoning, engaged in extensively by almost everyone (definitely including the Saints), that leads us away from God. I remember many years ago, a woman in Pasco, WA, threw her two sons off the cable bridge into the Columbia River. The boys drowned in the river. Horrific. Her excuse to police was that she was ensuring that they would go to heaven. There is no royal road to heaven. There is no loophole that allows people to "get in" that otherwise wouldn't "qualify". That is not the way God works. That is not the nature of heaven. There is one gate to heaven, one, not several, not many, not two. One. All who enter that heavenly rest do so through that gate. No exceptions. And the gatekeeper is Jesus Christ; he employs no servant there. Anyway, the cable bridge is a beautiful bridge:

that one of our younger sisters sent him.

Public service announcement: Pumpkin pie does not taste like pumpkin. It tastes like pumpkin pie spice.

That's fine. I'm not invested in any of these ideas, except that I think it makes huge sense that Nephi was trained in metalsmithing. All of my speculations are worth exactly what you paid to read them.

It's great for alloying, especially iron, making the steel tougher and less brittle.

Moses was the great lawgiver to the house of Israel. Josiah was the great post-Davidic lawgiver to Israel much later, who purged the worship of pagan gods from among Israel and re-established Jehovah worship. Nibley had the theory that Mosiah, the great lawgiver to the Nephite population post-emigration (under Mosiah I), was named for a combination of Moses and Josiah. I don't know how much water such an idea holds, but I thought it interesting.

I was hoping to see this here.

The Bayer process, by which most aluminum is extracted and purified today, would be unlikely to have been developed (or anything like it) in ancient times. As you note, less than 200 years ago aluminum was considered more precious than gold. Napoleon was said to have owned a flatware set of sterling silver for everyday use, one of gold for when guests were present, and one of aluminum for when heads of state were dining with him. tl;dr: I doubt ziff was aluminum. Chromium, perhaps, or another of the lightweight transition metals like manganese. On the matter of the name: The element was originally named aluminum—no second i. A British scientist named Thomas Young decided that aluminium sounded better and that the -ium suffix better fit the element naming convention; apparently, Young had never heard of molybdenum, lanthanum, tantalum, or that unknown element platinum. His opinion carried sway in Britain; but Americans, who didn't care about Sir Young's infatuation with sounding high and mighty, continued calling it aluminum. So Americans may hold their heads high, knowing that the spelling and pronunciation they use was in fact the original. Quite right. I agree with @zil.

Nothing wrong with your joke.

I wasn't playing lawyer or trying to impress anyone. Just seemed like the right word.

It's amazing to me how disculpatory the Book of Mormon is toward the Lamanites. It's even more amazing to me how the Nephites, at least when they were righteous, seemed to try to spare the Lamanites and didn't blame them for their extreme wickedness.

I think that actually is Kilimanjaro's caldera.

My possum story: My wife and I were living in married grad student housing at Penn State right in the geographic middle of Pennsylvania. (State College is actually located in Centre County; note the pretentious British spelling.) My wife is from western Pennsylvania, so this was more or less home for her, but not for me. Before moving to Penn State, I had lived exactly 2½ months in Pennsylvania, specifically in Philadelphia, as a missionary while waiting for my visa to Italy. So the eastern US was pretty much new to me. Anyway, we were coming home one late afternoon or evening just after (perhaps just before) the birth of our oldest child. We parked in the lot and walked across the grass to our apartment, when I saw the largest rat I had ever seen. This thing was literally the size of a cat. And not a tiny cat. It was getting dark, so I couldn't see as clearly as normal, but I was no more than 20 feet from it at one point. This rat just looked at me, then turned and ambled away. I didn't know what to do. I think my wife didn't see it. This apartment complex was infested with various pests, primarily cockroaches. I don't think I had ever seen a cockroach before moving to Penn State, and I will be a happy man if I never see another as long as I live. So the idea that rats might also live in the area didn't surprise me. After talking with my wife, I called the campus police and told the dispatcher, "I just saw the biggest rat I've ever seen." She asked me to describe it, and I did so as best I could. Then she told me, "That's not a rat, it's a possum." Oooooooooh. That explained a lot. **One in a continuing series on the life education of Vort**

I should have been commenting as we went, but I have been busy the last six weeks. Maybe I'll repent and go back to do comments. One comment I would have offered is pure speculation, and perhaps not useful for anyone else. But here it is. Nephi is presented as a superman of sorts, able to do just about anything that the Lord commands of him. He smelts gold, he builds ships, he creates bows and arrows, swords—you name it, Nephi does it. Now, the ship thing is well explained in the text: Nephi doesn't know how to build ships, so the Lord tells him. But even then, Nephi's first question to the Lord is: Where do I go to find ore that I can smelt to make the tools we're going to need? I don't know about you, but for me, that question would come up only after I had mulled the assignment over for a few hours, or days, or weeks. Nephi seems to have grasped immediately the overriding importance of building his tools. I propose the idea (and I'm sure I am not the first to come up with this) that Nephi was a blacksmith, or whatever the sixth century BC Hebrew equivalent of a blacksmith was. He was very young when the Book of Mormon narrative opens, and even when they quit Jerusalem in 600 BC, Nephi was probably no more than twelve years old. So I am guessing that Nephi had filled the role of apprentice, or the ancient Near East equivalent, for five or six years, however long from the time he was big enough to actually provide some help for the smithy. Nephi was large, quite strong for his age, and extremely smart and observant; as a twelve-year-old who had spent five or six years in a blacksmith shop, becoming familiar with the tools and techniques, perhaps being allowed by his master to work metal at the forge and maybe fit the odd horseshoe or something of the sort, he would have been capable of taking metals, including perhaps even iron, from an ore to a usable state. It's curious that Nephi, when dealing with the drunken Laban, removed Laban's sword from its scabbard and, even in a dark night, was able to recognize the fine workmanship of the weapon. Who does that? Only someone who has had extensive experience with weapons. I see no indication in the Book of Mormon that Nephi was ever a military person or that he ever had experience with weaponry; but if he was exposed to the creation of swords and other weapons, he would quickly learn to distinguish good workmanship from poor and fine steel from lesser products. Viewing Nephi as an experienced apprentice to a smith makes a whole lot of sense to me. It explains a lot, including how Nephi seemed to have a nose for finding ore and was undaunted at the idea of building himself a forge and working metal from ore to finished product. I wonder if, with Lehi's immense wealth, he took a substantial quantity of gold in the form of coins or bullion into the wilderness as a medium of exchange, which Nephi may have found use for by alloying it with copper and other elements to produce ore for his many plates. It's impossible to tell, of course, but it makes for a neat, tidy, elegant explanation for how the plates originated.

Remember that the small plates of Nephi were specifically created by Nephi to write "the things of [his] soul." They constituted a separate book or set of plates, and once finished, they were full. They were never intended to be added on to. That's my take on it, anyway. It's useful to remember that Nephi himself was apparently never really sure why he had been commanded to make a second, much smaller set of plates, nor any of the future caretakers of that set of plates. Only we today, with Martin Harris' history to look back at, are in a position to understand why they were created at all.

This brings up an area of personal interest to me. There are several cases in the Book of Mormon of seemingly incongruous mention of animals—incongruous because the animal is not known to be native to the Americas and is thought to have been introduced much later. One that professional antiMormons have made much of is the mention of "horses" in the Book of Mormon, when it has been assumed that horses were unknown to the Americas until introduced by the Spanish Conquistadores in about the sixteenth century. There are ancestral horse fossils in the Americas, of course, but no convincing horse remains from the past three thousand or so years up until the Conquistadores. Typical efforts to explain, or explain away, such objections usually focus on (1) identifying other, non-equine species of animal that may have served the same purposes as horses served in the Old World, such as being pack animals or food (or drawing a conveyance of some sort, as in Lamoni), and (2) claiming (rightly) that lack of evidence is not evidence of lack, and that small groups (or even large herds) of horses could well have existed in ancient Mesoamerica without leaving behind any trace of evidence. This is more like hand-waving than it is presenting any strong thesis, but such is the state of our understanding of ancient Mesoamerica. Grapes are another example of something mentioned or implied in the Book of Mormon but not known to grow in the Americas before the European colonization. What is never observed is the opposite: Animals and plants being excluded from mention that would not be expected. For example, I believe that the word "pig" never occurs in the Book of Mormon. Similarly, the idea of a seed of mustard is compelling and used to great effect in the Bible, so I would naively expect to have that same imagery carried over in the Book of Mormon. If the Book of Mormon were a fraudulent work of fake scripture, I would still assume such a mention to be made. Curiously, it's never mentioned in the Book of Mormon. A quick Google search confirms that mustard is an Old World plant that was imported into the Americas only in the past few centuries. So I'm not really going anywhere with this. I am not one to latch onto this or that oddity and try to use it to "prove" that the Book of Mormon is True. I do find such things interesting. I suppose such things could be considered "an evidence" of the Book of Mormon's literal truthfulness, and I'm not averse to using such examples as evidence of truth, as long as we're willing to concede the other side when it's used against the Book of Mormon.

I'm not sure. Alma 32 details the idea of nurturing the seed of the word of God in your heart, and having it grow up to be a tree of life for you. It's dissimilar in meaning but not really so much in feel to Christ's parable of the mustard seed, which perhaps explains the confusion. Not sure what king Noah has to do with anything; he was a wicked Nephite king that led his people into slavery for probably 20 years by his immorality and irresponsibility (and his penchant for hunting down prophets who said things he didn't like). You'll be reading about him soon enough.

True enough, but I suspect you may have missed what my big realization was this morning. It wasn't that "wer-" = vir; it was that the supposed word werman was not the normal OE term used to name adult men, and may not have been a standard word at all in Old English. The term for "man" (as in an adult male) was wæpnedman, not werman.

@JohnsonJones can speak for himself as to what he means by his statements—I certainly have no interest in pretending to be a Urim and Thummim—but I believe he did not mean "chain up" as you're parsing it. Rather, I think he was saying that there was a chain of occurrences leading up to the event under discussion.

What is the central feature in the caldera? Maybe that is the caldera? It looks much too perfectly round to be natural.

That's one way of looking at it. Another is, "We'll use the male pronoun for all ambiguous cases as well as for male cases, and we will save the female pronoun for when it's only women." In other words, preserve the gendered integrity of the female pronoun and use the male pronoun for all the ambiguous or indeterminate cases. I have very little patience these days for zealous efforts to identify and condemn non-existent linguistic sexism. (Not that you were doing so, Jamie. Just a general observation.) There is not. Even if there were a big push in France toward such nonsense (and I think there is no such push), the Académie française would quickly put an end to it. Once in a long while, having an iron-fisted linguistic ruling elite pays dividends.

I had learned that the Old English word man (or mann. as modern German has it) meant "person" or "human being", not specifically an adult male human. To specify an adult female, the prefix wif- would be added on, creating the word wifman—whence we derive both the modern words "woman" and "wife". But man alone usually referred to a person, not necessarily a man. (Note that wifman was grammatically neuter, but all pronouns referring back to the aforementioned wifman were inevitably gendered female.) All of the above appears to be perfectly true, though with the obvious caveat that I'm sure there were times when man was understood to mean an adult male, not merely a person. I expect it was heavily context-dependent. So here's the part I learned this morning: The counterpart to a wifman—that is, an adult male—would be a werman. The prefix wer- comes directly from the Latin vir, meaning "man" (male person, as opposed to a femina or female person). Note that in classical Latin pronunciation, such as would have been spoken in camp during the time of the Roman Empire, the word vir, more appropriately spelled in modern times as uir, would have been pronounced something like "weer" with a rolled or trilled R. (As in Latin, all Rs in Old English and Middle English were rolled or trilled, unlike the larger Germanic practice of using the gutteral R.) So for English to use wer- as a prefix meaning "male" makes perfect sense. Therefore, werman was the Old English way of saying "man" in the sense of an adult male. Everyone* knows this. Just one problem. It isn't true. *In this context, "everyone" means "everyone who cares enough about such things to have done a bit of reading, but who doesn't actually know enough to know it's untrue." It appears that the term werman is nowhere attested in the OE literature. The actual term used to distinguish an adult male was wæpnedman, literally "weaponed man", where wæpned was commonly used figuratively to mean "penis". The word wer was indeed sometimes used, in this case not as a prefix but as a standalone term, to mean man (male person). But wæpnedman appears to have been the word of choice to identify an adult male, and werman looks to have been made up, perhaps by some overenthusiastic OE grad student as a seemingly logical explanation of how things must have been. How about that?