The Greek derivatives in English spurt from a font of abstruse vocables that gives us, say, “dithyramb” — “a passionate or inflated speech, poem or other writing.” It’s a short hop to coinage such as “pithyramb” — “a passionate or inflated instance of pith” — proffered by… wait for it… a “pithyrambo.”
Take Hemingway, whom many of us cite unread. One of his characters says something like “bankruptcy comes on gradually, then all of a sudden.” A certain Ms. Clausing quoted in The Times pithyrambed it shamelessly:
… Ms. Clausing, the U.C.L.A. economist, warned against assuming that just because Mr. Trump’s policies haven’t harmed the economy yet, they never will. “The long run takes a long time to arrive, and when it comes it comes with astonishing swiftness,” she said.
As we await the long run’s arrival let’s kill some time tinkering with Woody’s ditty:
THIS LAND IS OUR LAND
(Call and Response)
This land is our land
(That land is our land)
From th’ shores of Green Land
(To th’ Cuban Eye Land)
From fair New Found Land
(Where’er we lay hand)
To th’ Hemisphere’s End
(Or where our troops land)
Your land is our land
(There is our Home Land)
(ICE Land is MY Land)
(Mar-a-La-GO-Land)
All real estate grand
(A place to grandstand)
Snooty Switzer-land
(Little Saint James Land)
All mine to COM-mand
(Kiss thy behind land)
The former Rhine Land
(All thine to DE-mand)
(c) 2026 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
EthicalDative 
And That’s Okay, But Don’t Worry, It’s Under Control’
Remarks by podcaster Jason Staples have led me to ponder the notion of “original” language relative to scriptures widely known via translation. My attention was drawn to Staples’s comment that the Book of Revelations “has mixed metaphors all over the place.”
… The Greek of Revelations comes off as very clumsy, reads like someone who is not exactly a native Greek speaker, or… well trained… Greek writer. This is someone who probably is multilingual and probably a Semitic speaker of some sort who is writing in this way.
Where Staples gooses the matter to the throaty pitch of a hermeneutical Harley is in asserting that “the messiness of it is also part of the design.”
And I think there are certain places where the grammar and so on is clumsy in ways that force you to kind of have to grapple with that aspect of it. I think the messiness of it is also part of the design, even, that forced you to deal with those mixed metaphors…
The rhetoricians will have a Greek term filtered through Latin for argument premised on convictedness drawing foreordained conclusion qualified by contingent disclaiming. Still, I’m attracted to the venture of tilting with refractory text through a grammatical lens as a discipline that courts illumination.
There’s that moment where the thunder — he hears “the thunders” — and he’s told, “Don’t write that down! Seal that up!” And that in some ways is I think the book communicating that, like, look, there’s a lot about this stuff that you’re just not going to be able to get, and that’s okay. There is a mystery that from the earthly perspective, from this side of heaven, you’re just, you’re not going to really fully understand, you have to get the angle from, you know, from heaven down, you have to get the God’s eye view to understand, to hear what’s going on, and you don’t have that luxury, but don’t worry, it’s under control.
This sort of language stymies communicative logic, but poetically and confessionally it has a grappling aspect not easily discounted.
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved