Re: English word order and bumper stickers

On Tuesday, September 14, 2004, at 05:51 , Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 04:43:23PM +0100, Peter Bleackley wrote:
>> Staving Elliot Lash:
>>
>>> I second this. In Hebrew:
>>>
>>> Baruch  ata adonai
>>> blessed you Lord
>>>
>>> "Blessed are you Lord."
>>>
>>> Jewish Prayers regularly begin with this Blessing from
>>> the Worshipers to God.
>>
>> And in the Catholic Mass
>>
>> Blessed are You Lord, God of all creation,
>
> I'll certainly conced that I was mistaken about the applicability of
> "bless".  However, I don't infer from either of the above specific
> examples that the speakeris the one blessing God.
The worshipers are blessing God.

> Don't know who is -
> maybe he's blessing himself -
That seems pointless.

> but I never heard it as us blessing him.
I just remind you what Doug wrote:
On Tuesday, September 14, 2004, at 03:49 , Doug Dee wrote:

> In a message dated 9/14/2004 10:24:45 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
> markjreed@MAIL.COM writes:
[snip]

> The Gospel of Luke (in the KJV) says "24:52 And they worshipped him, and
> returned to Jerusalem with great joy: 24:53 And were continually in the
> temple,
> praising and blessing
> God."
>
> It's similar in the RSV.
> People can bless God; that's a grammatical fact.
..and there are many similar examples in other parts of the scriptures.
The verb used in the Greek text is 'eulogein' which is rendered in the
Vulgate by 'benedicere' - both verbs literally mean 'to speak well of' 'to
praise'. The verb is used both of God speaking well of or praising people
or, indeed, anything created, and of people speaking well of and praising
God. I don't see any problem with that.

Both these verbs did develop secondary ideas, especially that of 'speaking
well' of something as opposed to cursing it, and then to speaking well of
something because it was set aside for a special purpose.

Chamber's English Dictionary lists the following meanings of the verb
'bless':
"to consecrate, to make the sign of the cross over:
to extol as holy, to pronounce holy or happy:
to invoke divine favour upon:
to wish happiness to:
to make joyous, happy, or prosperous:
to glorify:
to approve officially."

While certainly some of these meanings would be inapplicable in 'AMERICA
BLESS GOD', the 2nd and 6th meanings are surely possible: AMERICA EXTOL
GOD AS HOLY/ AMERICA GLORIFY GOD.

I see both LeftPondians & RightPondians use the name of country, region
etc when the mean the people  :)

Also I note the verb is subjunctive (as in 'Britannia rule the waves!') -
so it's only an exhortation which one is free to follow or ignore.

Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
===============================================
"They are evidently confusing science with technology."
UMBERTO ECO				September, 2004

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