Good morning. Reed Hoffman, one of the founders of Linked In, tells us that typing is over and voicepilling is here.
This is the word he has coined to capture the way, he says, we are set to bypass keyboards.
After the quill the pen, then the typewriter, the text, the voice note… but in voicepilling entire articles, essays or books - everything actually - is spoken directly to the machine for production. Hands-free.
Is voicepilling a word that will stick? Sounds unlikely but who knows? New words seem to be invented more rapidly than ever but then language is always being born again.
At an open mic event I was at this week one poet used the beautiful expression ‘sonder’ - the kind of neglected word from Chaucer or Shakespeare which etymologists and crossword compilers love to rediscover.
Sonder is defined as one’s realization that each person you pass by ‘is the main character in their own story, in which you are just an extra.’
The definition comes from John Koenig in his Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, a collection of words he created to capture emotions that he says, ‘we feel but don’t have the words too express’.
Some words or phrases disappear, some morph into new meaning… while others stick around for ever.
Few writers have had more stickability than William Tyndale. The 500th anniversary of his English New Testament is currently being celebrated in an exhibition at the British Library and, from next month, at St Paul’s Cathedral.
Tyndale believed it shouldn’t only be priests who could access the Bible, but that everyone should hear it in everyday English.
His translation, published in 1526, was so popular that when King James commissioned his 'Authorized Version’, nearly a century later, the royal translation team ripped ninety percent of their text straight out of Tyndale.
His phrases continue to haunt the language: 'from strength to strength’; ‘for better or worse’; ‘lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil’; ‘salt of the earth’ and ‘fight the good fight’.
Tyndale was after a poetic language understood by ordinary people and was so successful that, as someone said, ‘No Tyndale, No Shakespeare’.
Or as playwright David Edgar put it: ‘No Tyndale, No Kindle’.
But in democratizing religion, in translating the divine into the human, he was branded the ‘most dangerous man in England’ and burned at the stake.
The political powers could see, to use another of his phrases, ‘the writing on the wall’.
Words are dangerous.
Once you can speak the divine in your own tongue then you can bring god down from heaven onto earth and decide for yourself what your religion means for your life.
You can, as Tyndale wrote, ‘let there be light'
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