Vort

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?

At least you heard it right, even if you didn't parse it correctly.

It's that English accent that throws people off.

I'm guessing it's one or both of two possibilities: 1. As you suggest, he was instructing the heads of households what they should teach their households, with the wives and possibly children listening in on information that applied directly to them. We get this kind of instruction ourselves in General Conference from time to time, when e.g. bishops or other leaders are told how to deal with certain situations (such as temple recommend interview questions), with us the people who will be the recipients of this service listening in. 2. The term "brethren" as used by king Mosiah may have been a more general term that applied more widely than the English plural "brothers". This kind of unintended specificity seems to happen a lot when going between languages.

And as we all know, Kilimanjaro rises like a, um...leopard...above the Serengeti.

They do things differently down under. For example, I find the elephants surprising, but I had no idea you guys had a ward budge.

Because showmanship is the polar opposite of what the Spirit requires. The show itself, the spectacle, is by its nature immodest, as it exists to draw the eye to itself. The Spirit is never immodest, never showy. The things of God are of solemn import and should always be approached with that in mind.

I don't believe anything I read on Reddit. Partially, this is because I don't read Reddit (which is because I prefer not to bathe in raw sewage). But any time I see a Reddit story, it immediately goes into my "very likely false and ridiculously sensationalized" bin. Redditers just make stuff up out of whole cloth, and people swallow it and come back asking for more.

Not that I disagree—because I think I don't—but paying half of your income each year as taxes in a modern, rich western society is a very great deal different from having soldiers show up at your door, swords in hand, to require you to give half of everything you own. Not just what you've produced in the last year, but all you have. I think the two probably aren't really comparable.

Here's one I drew when our youngest was five and was upset that he didn't get to carry the flowers to the bedroom to give Mama her Mother's Day breakfast in bed. He curled up into a ball and pouted, and one of his older brothers found a lot of humor in the situation. The baby is at least an inch taller than that older brother now, so I guess that's his revenge.

Here's another she did about the same time, drawn-to-order especially for her Daddy.

Here's a comic that my then-16-year-old daughter made to order for me. She was and remains a very talented, very funny girl.

When my mother was a girl, she thought that the hymn was saying yoo-hoo unto Jesus. "Yoo-hoo, Jesus!" She thought it a bit informal, but when you're a child, you just accept things as they are, or at least as you perceive them to be. EDIT: For the benefit of @Jamie123, @prisonchaplain, and other friends who may not be familiar with LDS hymns: The "LDS version" (if I can call it that) of "How Firm a Foundation" used to have the first verse as follows: How firm a foundation, ye Saints of the Lord, Is laid for your faith in his excellent word! What more can he say than to you he hath said— You who unto Jesus for refuge have fled? This was actually compounded by how it's sung; the "You who unto Jesus" part is repeated three times in the chorus before the final four words are sung. Since the release of the 1985 hymnal, this final line has been updated to "...Who unto the Savior for refuge have fled?" I'm sure it's exactly for the above reason, though I never actually thought about "Yoo-hoo! Jesus!", so I never understood why they changed it until my mother told us what she had thought. Then it all became clear.

Martha Beck was such a liar that her own siblings disclaimed her. My understanding is that they unitedly discredited her allegations of sexual abuse (and there's not much the Nibley siblings are united on). The woman is shameless. Have no fear, she will one day be held to account for her words. Until then, we bear such people, defending ourselves as necessary and working to find the grace and charity to forgive and pray that they return to the fold.

Oh, say, can you see it?

For our anniversary maybe eleven years ago, my wife took us to a little town on the Olympic Peninsula called Sequim (I'll bet you $10 you don't pronounce that right—no cheating!) to spend the night in an old railway car converted into a hotel room. As part of our agreement, we left cell phones and laptops at home. Walking to the train car, we passed a small pond with ducks floating on it, and my wife casually said, "I wonder where ducks sleep at night?" I spent the rest of our anniversary trip wondering where ducks slept. When we got home, the first thing I did was go to the computer and Google "Where do ducks sleep?" Here's a stickman comic I made for the occasion (after we got back, of course) (and I gave the correct pronunciation for non-local family and friends):

Yeah, booing women is just mean. Boos and booze. That's a good one. Now added to my list.

I've never heard that before, but I can see it.

FWIW, every book is a treasure. I'm not exaggerating when I say that, in its own way, Ingall Wilder's writing is as compelling, engaging, and thoughtful as Austen. I would recommend the entire series to you, despite its label as "juvenile literature" (probably "young adult" is what they call it now). In my opinion, it's as classic for American literature as anything, including Clemens or Melville (though obviously aiming at a different target demographic and a different kind of reading experience). I may be biased by my enjoyment of the family aspect of her writing, how much she obviously loves and cares about those closest to her.

nough-tay!