Build and strengthen

Last night I was once again creating a glossary to accompany an English reading assignment for my Taiwanese students. The article had to do with health, and one of the words I had to gloss was build. My students were already familiar with the primary sense of that verb, as in "build a house" (Chinese 建造), but this article referenced "build muscle" and "build strong bones," which would have a very different Chinese translation: 增強, literally "strengthen." So that's what I put in the glossary: that build (in this context) means "strengthen."

This morning, I checked William Wright's blog and found a new post: "To build up and strengthen Elvenhome."

The study of water

Yesterday, I saw a link on Synlogos to a John C. Wright post titled simply "Eautology," and I clicked just to see what the word was supposed to mean. On first seeing it, I mentally pronounced it as a homophone of otology, thinking the first element must be eau, the French for "water." I guessed the t was added for euphony, or perhaps in reference to Scientology (cf. Blaintology, the cult led by David Blaine in South Park).

No sooner had I thought that than I knew it was impossible. John C. Wright tends, as I'm sure he would be the first to admit, to be be a bit prissy on matters linguistic, and there is simply no way in the shades below that he would ever dream of coining a word by sticking a Greek suffix on a French noun and inserting a random t in the middle. That's just something that will never, ever happen. It's not the way the universe operates.

I skimmed enough of the post to find out that eautology is actually from the Greek reflexive pronoun εαυτός, which I suppose I should have been able to guess on my own. I left a comment, which you can see there, saying, "I thought it was going to be the study of water!"

Of course the proper term for the study of water, with none of that unseemly Graeco-French miscegenation, is hydrology.

Less than 24 hours after skimming "Eautology" and leaving that comment, I was reading -- such are my omnivorous habits -- The Remarkable Record of Job (1988) by Henry M. Morris, which is a young-earth creationist take on that book of the Bible and is perhaps most notable for its memorable theory that the Leviathan described in Job 41 was actually a fire-breathing duck-billed dinosaur. The picture below is not from the book -- other YECs have since picked up on it -- but I'm pretty sure Morris was the OG.

Chapter 3 is called "Modern Scientific Insights in Job," and I started it today. I was surprised to find this on p. 36:

Knowledge is baking powder, France is baking.

Last night (the night of April 17), I visited Engrish.com, a site I used to check fairly regularly but hadn't been to in, oh, years probably. I ended up scrolling through lots and lots of photos, two of which stood out as synchronistically interesting -- one at the time, and the other in retrospect the next day.

On April 17, William Wright had posted "Mbasse: The union of Bread and Eriol at the House of Tom Bombadil," incorporating some of my recent bread-related posts and Debbie's comments. One of the things he writes about is how, in his attempts to understand the significance of the word mbasse (Elvish for "to bake" or "bread"), the only thing he could come up with at first was his post from a few weeks earlier about how he had heard the name Francis Bacon as "France is bakin'." That was from his March 19 post "Francis Scott Key" (posted exactly a week before the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore). In a comment there, I had left a link to my October 2023 post "Knowledge is power. France is bacon," which was also about misinterpreting the name Francis Bacon. It was in that context that the following Engrish.com post caught my eye:

The image is a sign on that says "Knowledge is powder," a mutated version of the famous Francis Bacon quote. The title of the post itself is "Keep baking, kids . . . ." I don't think that's a Bacon/bakin' pun like William Wright's, since Bacon isn't mentioned on the sign. I guess it's a reference to baking powder. So that's a very neat little sync-triangle, like the one I mention at the end of "Loaves of gold." My post links "Knowledge is power" with a misinterpretation of the name Francis Bacon; William's post links a misinterpretation of the name Francis Bacon with the word baking; and the Engrish post links the word baking with "Knowledge is power."

I've also noticed a "France is bakin'" link in my April 15 post "Bread is gold," which features this photo:

My focus was of course on the book titled Bread Is Gold, but notice the context: Two books to the right is Mastering the Art of French Cooking; two books to the left is No-Bake Baking.

The other interesting Engrish post became interesting only after I had seen the bread-and-butter T-shirt featured in my last post, "Beloved bread." Here it is:

Beloved bread

This morning's post, "Gold bars and bread worship (syncs with a side of meme critique)" continued the bread sync theme -- which began with "A loaf of bread is dear" (meaning both "expensive" and "beloved") -- and focused on the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. This is defined by Oxford as "the conversion of the substance of the Eucharistic elements into the body and blood of Christ at consecration, only the appearances of bread and wine still remaining." That is, the sacramental bread is literally transformed into God himself, but invisibly so; to the eye and other physical senses, it remains indistinguishable from ordinary bread. This is the idea lampooned in the Chick tract "Death Cookie":

Incidentally, that is likely an etymologically correct use of hocus pocus, which probably originated as a corruption of hoc est corpus, "this is the body (of Christ)."

This afternoon, I briefly visited a clothing store -- I just felt a random urge to go in and look around, which is something I very rarely do -- and I saw this T-shirt for sale:

"True love is visible not to the eyes but to the heart." Why this is illustrated with a slice of bread is anyone's guess -- the thought process behind East Asian T-shirt design will forever remain opaque to us -- but I think it's safe to say no allusion to transubstantiation was intended. (I don't think sacramental butter is a thing.) Massive coincidence. (Pun intended.)

After that, I returned to my office, where I found that some tabs were still open from when I was writing my last post. One of these was a Google image search for adoration of the blessed sacrament, which I had run to confirm that monstrances are associated with that practice rather than with the Mass proper. There in the second row of image results was this:

For my non-Catholic readers, the gold object is a monstrance, at the center of which is the sacramental bread. That is, it looks like bread, but we are informed that it is actually Love Incarnate. True love is visible not to the eyes but to the heart.

Gold bars and bread worship (syncs with a side of meme critique)

On April 16, I posted "Loaves of gold," a sync post which has to do with 金條, the Chinese term for a gold bar. Not just gold bars in general, mind you, but specifically in Chinese.

On April 17, Ann Barnhardt launched her spinoff site BarnhardtMemes.com, her inaugural post being "Barnhardt Meme Barrage 17 April, ARSH 2024." I discovered this this morning (April 18). The second meme in the barrage just happens to prominently feature gold bars in China:

That's kind of a confusing cartoon, actually. Shouldn't "currency wars" between the US and China involve the respective currencies of those two countries? Instead, we have gold (helpfully labeled "gold") and unlabeled banknotes which I assume from the color are US dollars. Where does the renminbi fit into the picture? And what exactly is being depicted? The Chinese buying lots of gold from the US, I guess, but how is that a currency war? I guess the upshot is that you, too, should invest in gold like those savvy Chinese, preferably via Merk Investments, LLC.

My post about Chinese gold bars was part of a larger cluster of syncs centered around bread, including my April 15 post "The Bread Cult," about a fictional cult that worships bread. An anonymous commenter said that reminded him of a Chick tract ridiculing the Catholic belief in transubstatiation (i.e., that the Eucharistic bread, or Host, literally becomes the Body of Christ). It was for this reason that another meme in Barnhardt's barrage caught my eye:

Sorry, Ann, but this is another crap meme. That thing on the right, by the way, is a monstrance, used for displaying the Eucharistic Host, but I know that only because of my research on Tarot iconography. I've attended Catholic Mass a dozen or so times but have never seen such a thing in person, and I'm not sure how many people would find it immediately recognizable. (Apparently, it is used primarily for something called the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament -- i.e., from the non-Catholic's point of view, worshiping bread.) A picture of a priest holding up a wafer would have communicated the idea much more effectively.

Beyond that, though, what is the point of the meme? Watch out, if someone supports abortion, that's a subtle warning sign that they may not believe in transubstantiation? Whose mind is that going to change? Is there anyone who might be willing to compromise on a little thing like killing babies but draws the line at voting for anyone who doesn't believe the sacramental bread literally becomes the flesh of Jesus Christ?

The idea that a baby in the womb is a person and shouldn't be killed is natural, spontaneous, and emotionally powerful. The idea that a piece of bread is actually God is counterintuitive and bizarre. It's not effective to argue for the former by assuming the latter. So strange does transubstantation seem to most non-Catholics that the cartoon (slightly modified) would almost be more effective as a pro-abortion* meme:

The message in this modified version is clear: People oppose abortion only because they subscribe to kooky religious dogmas that don't make any sense. If they try to tell you a clump of cells is a person, keep in mind that they probably believe a piece of bread is a person, too! (The reason I say this would almost be an effective pro-abortion meme is that transubstantiation is a distinctively Catholic belief, while the anti-abortion movement in the US is heavily Protestant.)

* I refuse to use the idiotic euphemisms both sides insist on.

Loaves of gold

(Not to be confused with "Leaves of gold.")

Wherever these bread syncs are going, the sync fairies seem intent on connecting all the dots.

In my April 11 post "A loaf of bread is dear," I logged a sync in which I had pasted the Chinese phrase 一條（麵包） , "a loaf (of bread)," into a document at exactly the same moment that a guest on a political podcast I was listening to said "a loaf of bread." She was saying that a loaf of bread was really expensive now due to inflation, and I connected that with a dream I'd had years ago about a Russian phrase meaning "bread is dear" or "bread is expensive."  I also wrote quite a bit about the Chinese measure word 條, which means "loaf" in connection with bread but is used more generally for many different long thin objects.

On April 15, I posted "Bread is gold." I had happened upon a book with that title and connected it with the idea of bread being "dear."

Today, April 16, I was teaching an adult EFL class. In order to illustrate and reinforce a grammar point I had just covered, about the use of the past continuous, we read a story about some burglars who robbed every apartment in a building while all the tenants were out, and it said what each tenant had been doing at the time of the robbery. Afterward, there was a speaking exercise where the students had to role-play the tenants talking to the police:

The story said what each person had been doing at the time of the robbery, but it didn't say what the burglars had taken from each apartment, so the students were free to make up whatever details they wanted. Most had the burglars take predictable things like jewelry, electronics, and cash, but one woman raised her hand and said, "Excuse me, how do you say 金條 in English?"

金條 means "gold bullion bar." The first character, 金, means "gold," and you may recognize the second, 條, as the one discussed in my April 11 post, which means "loaf" among other things.

So the April 11 post linked 條 to bread; the April 15 post linked bread to gold; and today's post links gold back to 條.

The Bread Cult

I'm not sure how it got started -- I s'pect it just grow'd -- but sometime in my early teens, the idea of a Bread Cult became current in my circle of friends. This was a fictional organization -- there was never any attempt to found it or to pretend that it actually existed -- and yet there was never any fiction written about it, either. Bread Cultists did put in a few appearances as antagonists in our D&D games, but the Cult was already an established idea by then. Everyone knew what the Bread Cult was, just as everyone knew what orcs were. It was just a free-floating shared idea.

The Bread Cult worshiped bread, and their slogan was, appropriately enough, "Bread: Worship It." Their symbol was originally a rising sun over a loaf of bread, but later the sun was replaced with a skull as the Cult's image took a darker turn. This slogan and iconography were popular subjects for doodling.

The darker turn I mentioned was partly my mother's fault. She once saw or overheard something about people "worshiping bread" and thought it was about the soft rock band from the seventies, fronted by David Gates, which none of us kids had ever heard of. She apparently found Bread intolerably sentimental and gooey and summarized their music as "I found the diary underneath the tree and threw up."

That line quickly became incorporated into the legend of the Bread Cult: The Cult had been a secret society whose very existence was unsuspected for centuries until someone happened to find Minutes of the Bread Cult under a tree, read a few pages, and promptly threw up all over it. No one knew how these very secret Minutes came to be under a tree in the first place -- there were various theories -- and about the content of the Minutes no one dared even speculate. The vomit-soaked book had become illegible and could not be salvaged, and the vomiter took his secret to the grave. Anyway, whatever it was, it was obviously something unspeakably foul.

The only publicly known ceremony of the Bread Cult was innocuous enough, though: the Bread Exchange. The Cult maintained a detailed list of exchange rates for various types of bread -- telling you how many slices of whole-wheat toast could be exchanged for how many buttermilk biscuits and so on -- and once a year all the Cultists would convene, exchange bread with one another, and go home.

One of the stranger rumors surrounding the Cult was that they were secretly behind a Sesame Street-themed toy from Playskool called Busy Poppin' Pals, and that every detail of its design held esoteric significance for initiates.

My best friend's little brother happened to own this very toy, but not being initiates ourselves, we were never able to decode its secret meaning.