Regularly Expressing

Month: April 2008

  • California Demon

    I just finished “California Demon” by Julie Kenner. It is a humorous fast-paced story of a mom who hunts demons while her toddler is in day care. I think I liked it even better than the first book, “Carpe Demon.”

    Things I liked:

    1. Solidly plotted and entertaining story with engaging characters. The heroine, Kate Conner, has two kids, thirteen years apart (the daughter is the older one). This is exactly like my family, and I can tell you that the personalities of the children are exactly right.
    2. This story has a secret organization within the Vatican — and they are the good guys! As a Catholic, I get tired of seeing religious people in general and Catholics in particular as the villains. In fact, no group of people gets put down in these stories (well, except the demon-possessed).
    3. One needs holy water and relics to fight demons, not generic symbols of faith. Remember those good old days before political correctness?
    4. The only sex in the book is between married people, and the details are left up to our imagination.
    5. Virtually no swearing. Many stories use foul language because it is “realistic.” I don’t want realism in the novels I read.

    In other words, it’s just a lot of good clean, demon-bashing fun!

  • Nomina Sacra

    Some early Old Testament Greek manuscripts glorify God’s name by writing them in Hebrew characters. Some of my Jehovah’s Witness friends have made much of this fact, as properly reverencing the Divine Name is of central important to them.

    I have recently discovered, in “The Cambridge History of the Bible, Vol I,” that these manuscripts with the Divine Name in Hebrew were Jewish manuscripts. While Christians did not observe the same practice, they did specially mark nomina sacra (i.e. sacred names) by leaving out a few vowels and writing a line over the contraction. What is interesting to me is that the nomina sacra include the words Theos (God), Kourious (Lord), Kristos (Christ), and Iasous (Jesus).

    It is interesting evidence on two fronts:

    1. It treats the names God and Jesus on an equal footing, making clear the Divine status attributed to Jesus.
    2. It seems to leave out references to the Holy Spirit, as well as references to God as Father do not make use of this practice. Thus this practice does not give evidence to the Doctrine of the Trinity, but because “the Father” does not get this treatment it does not seem to be evidence against it either.

    These four words were not invariably written this way, if the usage were non-theological then it would be written without contraction.

    The Bible refers to Christians were “Believers in the Name.” What was this name? In New Testament usage, a name is not necessarily a literal word, but sometimes an authority, power, or personal identity. The practice of the sacra nomina points to four words that identify the sacred name and testify to a primitive belief in the Divinity of Chrst.

  • Custom Dictionaries, Aspell, and LaTeX

    It took me a bit of hunting and twiddling to figure out exactly how to use aspell with a custom dictionary that supplements (not replaces) the master dictionary, so I thought I’d document it for posterity.


    aspell --lang en create master ./custom_dict.aspell < ./custom_word_list.txt aspell --add-extra-dicts=./custom_dict.aspell -t -c my_document.tex

    And that's it for the checking part. The only latex specific piece is the "-t" option which tells aspell to filter out latex nonsense. If you remove it, then you can use this recipe with a more generic text document.

    To create my initial word list I did this:


    aspell -t list -a < my_document.tex | sort -u > ./custom_word_list.txt

    This command just creates a list of unrecognized words from the document, and ensures that the are sorted and unique. After I created it I went through and carefully edited the word result. Enjoy.