Do You Speak the Lingo?
Last September, Rachel, Ana, and I went on a vacation in the upper peninsula of Michigan. It is a great place to get away – from nearly everything. On the advice of a friend, we went through Grand Marais to eat at a diner there, an old diner that has been renovated to provide more space. You’ve surely eaten at one of those old diners.
Many of our modern English terms and abbreviations have come from the world of the diner. Chumley’s Restaurant in New York City was located at 86 Bedford Street. If a rowdy customer was causing issues, he would be thrown out the back door. “86’d” came to be slang for anything that was thrown out. That type of language was ubiquitous in the diners of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.
In those years, it was common for waitresses, rather than writing down the orders, to yell the orders to the cooks. For example, two poached eggs on toast and milk would be yelled as, “Adam and Eve on a raft with moo juice.” The “moo juice” is understandable but “Adam and Eve on a raft”? You would have to be “on the inside” to get that language.
But, some of those shortened terms have stayed in our language today. Did you drink OJ this morning? Maybe with a stack? Perhaps you will have a BLT for lunch, with mayo. It could have been fun to guess what certain terms meant. Today, the menus are easily understood, although I suspect that waitresses and waiters still have a shorthand they use that we, the customers, might not understand.
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I don’t know about you but it annoys me when a Bible teacher uses words or phrases that are not biblical, like “cruciformity” or “recapitulation theory.” Only the most erudite in the audience would understand what those terms mean. In fact, the teacher has to explain them since you can’t open the Bible to learn their definitions. There are other terms that are less esoteric but, nevertheless, little understood by the average Christian and almost certainly not understood by the non-Christian in the audience, like the term “hermeneutic.”
There are biblical terms that are biblical and can be understood biblically, for those who have a strong knowledge of the Bible, like “redemption” or “sanctification” or “propitiation.” But at the same time, we teachers and preachers ought to be sensitive to the youth, uneducated, and non-Christians in our audience who will not be familiar with those very biblical terms. We need to take a moment to explain the terms we use, not in an insulting way but in a way that desires to share the good news of Jesus Christ.
A waitress can get by with using slang terms since the ones she’s speaking to speak her language. But in worship and Bible class, let us speak to be understood. Paul cautioned the Christians in Corinth about the supremacy of prophesying (speaking in the audience’s language) versus speaking in foreign languages:
“But if all prophesy, and un unbeliever or an ungifted man enters, he is convicted by all, he is called to account by all; the secrets of his heart are disclosed; and so he will fall on his face and worship God, declaring that God is certainly among you” (1 Cor. 14:24-25).
Let us not seek to show off our education but seek to be understood by the young and uneducated.
