When I was a kid, there were two initialisms used in my circle that were always pronounced as if they were French: HPA ("osh-pay-ah") and LPF ("el-pay-eff"). For the former, there was a brief period where the Portuguese pronunciation replaced the French, so the H was said as "aga."
HPA came from News Norm, the handwritten newspaper with made-up stories that my youngest sister produced when she was very young. (See "Swampgas Newsboy, by Bob Dictionary") One issue included a letter to the editor demanding that the fire department do more to "make sure the firemen are not sick or HPA." She had remembered that there was a three-letter initialism that referred to hyperactivity (she was thinking of "ADD") and had guessed it was probably HPA for hy-per-active. After that, "osh-pay-ah" became a way of referring to any sort of high-strung or manic behavior.
LPF came from a brief craze for using a sewing machine to make "long pointed floppy" hats -- long, limp cones of fabric, with no brim, that were generally three to five feet long.
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What brought these two initialisms back to mind was 1 Corinthians 13. I was thinking about the difficulty of translating the key word into English -- neither charity nor love is really adequate -- and thinking about the original Greek word (agape) made me think of HPA, the Portuguese version of which sounds a lot like agape; and then HPA reminded me of LPF.
I hadn't thought about LPFs in a good long time. The LPF craze was long before I knew any Hebrew or anything about the Temple, but that's the direction my thoughts went when I thought about "ell-pay-eff" now. It made me think of a Temple formula used in the past, consisting of three syllables including "pay" and "ale." One common interpretation is that these represent the Hebrew pe "mouth" and el "god," respectively. This made me wonder if eff could also be interpreted as Hebrew. My first thought was that it could be a truncation of efes, the modern Hebrew word for the numeral zero.
God Mouth Zero? Searching for that string turned up this 1996 Smashing Pumpkins EP. Pumpkins are a long-running sync theme, so I took that as synchronistic encouragement of this train of thought.
Thinking about eff as part of a Hebrew word reminded me of something I had seen on YouTube several days ago: emerging cult leader Shane Baldwin saying that the seven "angels" to whom the letters in Revelation 2-3 are addressed represent various prophets from different times in history ("dispensation heads," for those who know the Mormon lingo), and that "the angel of the church of Ephesus" is Joseph Smith. He said he first made that connection because both Joseph and Ephesus include the string eph. Thinking about this now in the context of LPF, I noticed that Ephesus includes not just eph but the complete word ephes, "zero." In fact, since the -us (-os in Greek) is just a grammatical suffix, varying from case to case, the real root name of the city is simply Ephes -- coinciding exactly with the Hebrew for "zero."
When I went to Baldwin's channel to try to track down the video in question, I noticed a new video claiming that a near-complete Quran engraved on gold plates had been discovered and that the hosts of another Mormon podcast, Stick of Joseph, had seen the plates. Stories like this come out from time to time and usually end up being hoaxes, but it piqued my curiosity enough that I typed stick of joseph quran into the search bar and pressed enter. These two videos were juxtaposed in the search results:
I am getting so sick of these "AI"-generated thumbnails. Is there any channel left that doesn't use them? Anyway, the sync fairies will make use of whatever is at hand. The first thumbnail says AGAPE in big letters, and the second says JOSEPH. I had just been thinking about the name Joseph in connection with the word for "zero," so it seems significant that Joseph's face is blanked out in the thumbnail, making him a "zero."
4 comments:
Nooo, you can't just use paintings or photographs as thumbnails.
Yes
The white face of Joseph definitely fits a few themes. First off, the "face off" theme, but I think more specifically Abinadi's encounter with Noah (of course).
The white face gives gives the effect of a white, shining face, further reinforced by the fact that Joseph's hood is glowing around the white face. As you know, in Noah and his priests' interrogation of Abinadi, his face began to glow (an event Mormon directly compared with events surrounding Moses):
"Now it came to pass after Abinadi had spoken these words that the people of king Noah durst not lay their hands on him, for the Spirit of the Lord was upon him; and his face shone with exceeding luster, even as Moses’ did while in the mount of Sinai, while speaking with the Lord."
Luster means "gloss, radiance", and is a synonym of White, which I have used in its earlier meaning to indicate something that shines: "bright, radiant; clear, fair... to shine".
The Being who played Abinadi is the individual I have guessed is the same as the Seer prophesied by Joseph whose "name should be called after [him]", so the picture fits.
Agape then is also interesting in this context. You used the meaning of 'brotherly love, charity'. It also has another meaning of "with the mouth wide open" (as in wonder)". It is the wonder piece that creates the link. After Abinadi's face shone, he told Noah and his people that they were filled with "wonder and amazement":
"Ye see that ye have not power to slay me, therefore I finish my message. Yea, and I perceive that it cuts you to your hearts because I tell you the truth concerning your iniquities.
"Yea, and my words fill you with wonder and amazement, and with anger."
The reference to Brotherly Love in this instance also strikes me as relevant. After citing Rameses and Moses in comment in an earlier post, I have been drawn back to that storyline in that cartoon/ movie which portray the two as brothers. Part of Moses efforts in that story is to not only to free the Children of Israel, but also to hopefully convince Rameses to choose a different path and avert his own personal disaster.
In their 'face off' song (in which we get another one of those split face images, with Rameses face cast as Blue and Moses as Red, though the typical sides from your other images are flipped), they keep referring to each other as brothers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJleW4TCQM0
I don't know if you've ever seen anything similar, but I've read the argument that in Semitic Koine Greek "agape" was a near-synonym of "philia" and that it was essentially becoming the generic term for "love" in that context. I think the argument was based on contemporary non-biblical sources, but if you look at the Septuagint it seems fairly clear that the verb form "agapao" is used everywhere for every conceivable permutation of "love" (including violent lust, e.g. Shechem for Dinah, Amnon for Tamar...). The notion that it inherently refers to a particular highly-rarefied type of love seems very strong in subsequent commentators though.
I watched the video about Joseph, As advertised, it tells the story from the Koranic perspective; which, it turns out, isn't all that different from the biblical. Throughout, Joseph's face was blanked; though, occasionally and briefly, a minimum of facial physiognomy was outlined against the persistent whiteness. Everyone else was depicted in the normal manner. I've always been given to understand that Islam forbids images of living creatures, and presumably that's why Joseph's face was blanked. He was simply too exalted to have his facial features portrayed in full-- though everything else about him was, as well as everyone else. Talk about the will to overcome physiognomy! I guess in this video age, if you can't show living beings, you're going to have a difficult time telling your stories. A perfect example of prophecy's ideal character and lack of physical substance; one must sin in order to materialize it.
I don't know whether anyone here would be willing to entertain the notion that this modus of depicting Joseph means that he is, in effect, headless. Then, remember that Joseph is thrown into a well by his brothers (they, like the video's producers themselves, must sin that prophecy might be brought to pass). Though not exactly underwater and decapitated, it is at least obliquely resonant with the severed heads and wells that just recently were in the stream.
*Somewhat on the subject of HPA and LPF... The surah of the Koran that tells the story of Joseph-- the twelfth surah, entitled "Joseph"-- begins with three mysterious Arabic letters that don't form a word in Arabic: Alif, Lam, Ra. (ALR)
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