Babel

In the book of Genesis, there is a story about the tower of Babel, and where God confounded man's language, to make it harder for us to work together against His purpose. Some people question the veracity of the account, but certainly language is often a barrier to communication. This is not only true of people that don't speak the same language, it is often true of people that speak the same language, but in different ways.

It's been said that the United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language. We say that we speak English, but there are many differences between the English spoken in the Untied States and the English spoken by the English people. Some of things that have evolved since the US gained its independence, some are things that simply were not standardized until after the split, still other things were adopted by one country or the other as a result of immigration. Automobile terminology provides several examples: What we in the US call the trunk (of the car), the Brits call the boot; what we call gas, they call petrol; our bonnet is their hood; etc. We still use the same units of measure, although the EU has tried to get the UK to adapt metric units.

It's also true that specialists in a particular field have a tendency to develop their own jargon. This is not always an attempt to be exclusionary, but it does work out that way sometimes. Jargon can make people within a certain specialty communicate more effectively with each other, but make it harder to communicate with 'outsiders' who are not familiar with the jargon. One individual I know has told me many times that PhD really stands for "Please Have Dictionary." If you've ever taken a college course taught by a PhD, you probably know exactly what he means. It isn't that they are trying to obfuscate the learning environment, however, the tendency to eschew technical terminology amongst individuals being indoctrinated into the profession isn't always what it should be. Sometimes the terms used within a profession become so ingrained that the professional doesn't stop to think that he or she needs to simplify the terminology when speaking to trainees, customers, or anyone else that wouldn't be familiar with the jargon.

Another thing that I have run across on occasion is that journalists are experts in researching things and expressing those things in such a way that the average person can understand. Journalists spend a lot of years in college learning the skills necessary to accomplish this. Unfortunately, they learn about writing, but they don't learn very much about the subject matter that they are supposed to be writing about. Frequently newspaper or magazine articles appear that have been considerably 'dumbed-down,' either as a result of the reporter's limited knowledge of the subject matter, or the reporter's belief that the average person knows even less than the reporter. Occasionally this happens simply because the publication isn't willing to let the article take up enough space in order for it to contain a thorough explanation of the subject. I get irritated sometimes when something happens, but when I read the local coverage of the event, I find myself still unsure of what actually happened. Doing a little research, I find another account of the same event, only to find that it's pretty much word-for-word the same account. Why? because both articles came off of the AP newswire, and the AP reporter didn't get the details that I was looking for. In those instances, I really wish that I could talk to somebody who has first hand knowledge.

One of the things that disturbed me the most is that a lot of people read books about what the Bible says, but don't ever actually read the Bible itself--not even to check the passages referred to in the book. Even if the author is legitimately trying to make scripture easier to understand, at best, you are limiting yourself to his understanding. I don't mean to suggest that such books are bad, or that reading those books won't help (sometimes they will, but sometimes they won't), but I will say that if you read the scripture for yourself, you may gain a greater understanding.