A headlong rush.[After the town of Gadara in a biblical story where two demon-possessed men ask Christ to send them into a herd of swine. They dash into the herd and all the animals rush violently over a cliff.]
"Research from Greenwich Associates has identified a Gadarene rush by Japanese financial institutions into hedge funds." John Plender; Punting, Not Hedging; Financial Times (London, UK); Sep 27, 2004.In the 1920s, while barring the teaching of foreign languages, Texas governor Miriam "Ma" Ferguson picked up a Bible and famously declared, "If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for Texas."
The governor could be excused for not knowing that what she held in her hand was a translation, but not for mixing state and religion. But here we'll focus on the former.
If anything, she unknowingly presented an argument for better teaching of history and geography. There was no language called English at the time of Christ, nor was the Bible written in English. The books making up the text of the Bible were written in various languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek). So much for mandating monolingualism!
The text of the Bible encompasses a variety of genres: prose and poetry, letters and songs, acrostic and puns, prophecy and beyond. The Bible is also a rich source of metaphors many of which have become part of the language. This week we've picked five such biblical allusions.
-Anu Garg
anu@wordsmith.org
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