Jeremy Thompson Catholic PhD in Biblical Languages, Programmer, Runner

Since the most recent changes to the Roman Missal almost every Sunday we’ve been saying:

through my fault, through my fault,
through my most grievous fault; …

I’ve noticed that in our congregation almost everyone says “grievious” as opposed to “grievous.” I knew that sometimes speakers insert an “-i-” into words like “grievous” and “mischievous.”  But, I didn’t realize that this was perhaps becoming the dominant way of pronouncing the word. My guess is that it’s probably on analogy with words like “devious” and “previous.” Has anyone else noticed if this is becoming the primary way that “grievous” is pronounced?  Or, is this just a quirk of our congregation?

In a previous post, I showed you how Python can let you print important things over and over again. Here I’m posting a video that just might save your soul with the code for the quiz at the bottom of the post:

from random import randint
import sys

questions = {1 : [“Joel is a hell-bound heretic.”, “true”],
2: [“GrEEK is awesome.”, “false”],
3: [“John Wesley was a Christian.”, “false”],
4: [“GrEEK is lame.”, “true”],
5: [“Zwingli’s real name is Hurlrick Zwiggly.”, “true”],
6: [“The Orthodox are orthodox.”, “false”],
7: [“Luther started the reformation while inebriated.”, “true”],
8: [“Hebrew is awesome.”, “true”]}

while True:
question_number = randint(1, 8)
QA = questions.get(question_number)
inp = raw_input(QA[0] + ” True or False? “)
if inp.lower() == QA[1]:
print(‘yay! cool! you got it!’)
elif inp == “”:
break
else:
print(‘no! wrong! study to save your soul!’)

For those who were interested, below is a link to the audio from my talk on violence in the Old Testament this past Monday at Holy Ghost. It’s very echo-y since it was in the parish hall and the train passed twice, but you should be able to hear it okay.

Old Testament Violence

(right-click/ctrl-click and choose “save link as …” to download)

Last night I started a series of Lenten Reflections in my church parish.  These are intended for lay people in my parish, so hopefully they are free from academic jargon.  If you are in a tradition that celebrates Lent, or even if you are not, you might want to give them a listen.  There will be four of them and they will all be around 45 minutes to an hour.  Some of the preliminary stuff may not interest you as it deals specifically with my parish ministry, but that only last about 5 to 10 minutes on the first recording.

I’m recording on my laptop and I can’t get the input volume to go any higher.  So, you may need to listen with headphones.  Otherwise, I think you should be able to download the audio and burn it to a CD if you would like or put it on your iPod or other digital player.  Just don’t sell it ;-), though I’m not in any way implying that it might be something worth buying.

At any rate, I hope that some of my readers and others who visit my site may find it beneficial for their Lenten journey.  On this page you can find a fuller description of the reflections and on this one you can listen to the first one.