Some day my station will be changed
I just received a mass email, to his friends and family, from a friend of mine from high school, who was raised Lutheran but had a conversion experience at some point either in Canada or in southern Europe and joined the Orthodox Church, going so far as to join a monastery, announcing that he had lately become tonsured a monk—I didn't even register the full extent of what that meant (thinking, based on the picture of him and his father, who had come up to the monastery for the occasion, that perhaps its chief significance lay in his now being able to wear a funny-looking hat) until I noticed that the email was signed, not "Br. $name", as his emails had been in the past, but rather "Fr. $name".
Progress in life!
Also, the email was written in English, German, Finnish, and what turns out to be Icelandic. FUN FACT: "frændfólki" is Icelandic for "friends" (in what I take to be the dative case), and "pabba" (possibly also dative) is father. The only real surprise here is that it isn't in more languages, though. (It is also interesting to see what differences exist between the versions; in all of them but the English he explains what "rosophore" means, and the opening sentence gets (omitting the Finnish) progressively lengthier: "I thank you all for your prayers"; "Ich danke Euch allen für Eure Gebete meinethalber"; "Ég þakka ykkur öllum fyrir að hafa beðið til Guðs fyrir mig"—something like "I thank you all for having prayed to God for me"? Interesting that, on the wiktionary page, the example for the verb meaning "pray" also explicitly includes the "to god" part; I also wonder what the relation of "biðja" is to "bieten", "bitten", and "beten". The simple past, "bað", is closest to "bat", and "bade" in English; the OED's etymology for "bid" links it in various meanings to both "bitten" and "bieten" (surviving, I guess, in making a bid at auction), and also mentions ON "biðja" in senses pertaining to both asking and praying; apparently "bid" itself used to mean "pray": "I bidde god I neuere mot haue Ioye" isn't a command but a pressing request. Of course, none of that explains the histories of the three different German verbs, but then, it is an English dictionary.)
Comments
on 2008-03-23 17:01:43.0, bitchphd commented:
You could just say "hey, remember me?"