A Wandering With Words: "M's"

I spent last evening with the OED. Before you rush to console me for the poverty of my social life, however, I would like you to listen to my tale of gratitude for the OED. I am one who believes that words open worlds; thus for three hours last night I was able to enter into places where I don't normally go, see sights I don't normally see, and to smile and even laugh at times because of what I saw. This and the next essay tell you about that journey. Perhaps you, too, will want your horizons expanded. You could do much worse than beginn with this classic dictionary.

Picking a Starting Point--With "Miz"

I don't know why I began with "Miz." Oh, yes, now I remember. I was reading ch. 1 of Jane Austen's Emma, and it had a reference to raining as "mizzling." So, I looked up mizzle to discover that it meant, among other things, "to rain in very fine droplets; to drizzle." Then, my mind began its journey. It first stopped at "Mizpah." I knew I had learned the word, but I had forgotten it. It designates a piece of jewelry with "Mizpah" inscribed on it, intended to be given as a love token. Then, the meaning rushed back. It was the the name of the place in Gen. 31:49 where Jacob and Laban erected a cairn as a sign of their covenantal agreement. It means "May the Lord watch between us." A traditional piece of mizpah jewelry is split into two pieces and can be worn by the separated parties to remind them of each other and their connection. Very cool.

Then I wandered down to Mizrach, defined either as a "plaque hung on the east wall of a room to indicate the direction of Jerusalem" or, simply, "the east." Since prayer directed in the direction of Jerusalem is crucial in Judiaism, you have to know where "east" is. Of course, this assumes that you are west of Jerusalem. The word only originated in English (derived from the modern Hebrew verb zarah, to "rise") in 1892, and by then almost all the world's Jews were west of Jerusalem. So, "east" was the direction of Jerusalem. The identical Arabic term is mihrab. Oh to know all the Semitic languages. As one old professor was heard to say, "If you know all the Semitic languages, learning any one of them is easy..."

A Mizo is "a member of a people inhabiting parts of north-eastern India, especially the territory of Mizoram." Then this plunged me into several minutes of pleasure as I studied the extreme Eastern region of India, called the land of the "Seven Sisters" or "Seven Sister States." This article tells you of this colorful but remote section of India, where Mizoram is one of seven states. Of the 38.6 million people living here, Mizoram, the most forbidding in topography, only has about 800,000. This book is one of the few that provides extensive photography and description of the people and practices of this unique region of the world. In fact, there are more than 500 ethnic groups in this area stretching from Tibet to Myanmar (Burma). I am humbled when I realize how little I know of our world...

Mkhedruli Opens a World

Your pronunciation is as good as anyone's--but the way it is suppposed to sound is MEH-ke-drew-li. If we thought that Mizoram was exotic, the world to which Mkhedruli opens may even be more so. It is "the Georgian script of 33 (originally 38) characters as developed for secular use in the 11th cent. and still used for printing and writing the modern Georgian language." [Georgia is not South of South Carolina; it is in the Caucausus Mountains of Asia]. This definition brought shivers to me, not because I was cold, but it brought back memories of long ago, memories that I would like to share with you.

The Memories a Word Creates

When I was in graduate school at Brown University about 27 years ago, I decided to present a paper for the regional meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. It was my first professional paper, and normally no one of any stature attends papers given by grad students. But Harvard, Yale and tons of other significant schools were in the region--and you never know. So, I decided to do a paper on a person who initiated the academic study of the Bible at Brown, Dr. Robert Pierce Casey (1897-1959). Casey was a person of enormous learning both in "standard" stuff and in quite arcane subjects. He was one of the first Americans to study classical Armenian seriously, and he also taught himself ancient Georgian. So, I did a paper on him. Quite contrary to my expectation, the room was full (about 100 people), and it was peopled with many of the senior professors of the elite schools in New England--they either had known Casey at Brown or Cambridge and they wanted to hear about him. I will never forget Sydney Ahlstrom of Yale, who had just completed his magisterial Religious History of the American People, pinning me to the wall in such a gracious way about certain details of Casey's life. It was sort of an unintended baptism by fire for a slightly over-confident 27 year-old (it must have been early in 1980), but it made me never forget Casey, and it always created in my heart a place for those who studied the languages and cultures of the "Ancient Christian East," as it is called.

Later that year, I was taking a course in Syriac grammar from Dr. Robert Thomson, who held the chair in Armenian Studies at Harvard. When I mentioned this to Dr. Jacob Neusner, one of my professors and the brilliant, idiosyncratic and hypergraphic professor of Judiasm at Brown, he looked at me quizzically and said, "Why would you ever want to study that?" I fumbled in my answer to him, also. But still I persisted. I told Dr. Thomson one day about my interest in Casey, and he said that for the Georgian material, I could do no better than to contact a friend of his, Dr. Neville Birdsall, of Birmingham (England). So, I wrote to Birdsall. He, who died in 2005, wrote to me an eight-page hand-written letter telling me with great passion and detail the ways that a young person might find excitement in Georgian studies. I, who was wavering at the time regarding my future direction (though by this time I had been awarded a fellowship to finish my doctorate at the University of Tuebingen, German), was overwhelmed with the graciousness, intelligence and focus of these men for mining the details of things that never in a millennium would enter into the minds of 99.9% of Americans. It forever convinced me that my efforts to understand things in the future had to be very well-supported, broadly argued and linguistically competent. Sometimes all you need is the example of people...

Concluding...

So, my learning of mkedruli brought all these thoughts flowing back to me. It made me also spend some time looking at (for I really didn't study) the Georgian alphabet online; review some recent Georgian scholarship on early Christianity; and even check out the summer school at Tbilisi, Georgia, which has a five-week series of 'crash summer courses' on ancient/modern Georgian language and culture. I almost decided to sign up....

See what words can do to you? Well, the next essay recounts what happened when I ran into a few more words--words that produced a universe of different thoughts and feelings in me. Read on.

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