10 BEAUTIFUL BUILDINGS INSPIRED BY FAMOUS BOOKS. A lot of these are terrific--and can I just say that I love that the Hobbit one is a motel? My only disappointment is that it isn't somewhere in Lolitaville, USA.

"HOW ARE LOVE AND PITY RELATED?" Via... JWB?

"FOR MANY BLACKS, THERE'S ONLY ONE BIBLE, AND IT'S THE KJV":

On Sundays, C. Elizabeth Floyd, shows up for worship at Trinity Baptist Church of Metro Atlanta, with her Bible in hand.

But the large, black leather Bible with dog-eared pages and hand-written notes in the margins isn't just any Bible: It's the King James Version.

And Floyd, like many African-Americans, wouldn't have it any other way. It's more than mere tradition. A civil rights veteran called the KJV's thees and thous "romantic," and a scholar spoke of black churches' "love affair" with the king's English. ...

"It's the predominant version of the Bible that's used at Trinity." More than other Americans, African-Americans have clung to the KJV's 400-year-old elevated prose. According to a recent study by LifeWay Research, only 14 percent of African-Americans have never read the KJV, compared to 27 percent of U.S. adults overall.

The Rev. Cheryl Sanders, an ordained minister and professor of Christian ethics at Howard University School of Divinity, said the KJV's soaring language can uplift listeners, especially those who have been oppressed.

"It's a loftiness to the language that I believe appealed to people who are constantly being told, `You don't count. You're nobody. You're at the bottom rung of the ladder," said Sanders, who has written about black Christians' use of the KJV. "If I can memorize a verse of Scripture, it gives me a certain sense of dignity."

more (via GetReligion)

You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
--Zork I on the Bible

(hey man, not my joke, although it definitely sums up my feelings about sola scriptura)

"SUICIDED: THE ADVERSATIVE PASSIVE AS A FORM OF ACTIVE RESISTANCE."

Language is changing at a torrid pace in China, and it's not just a massive infusion of English words that is to blame. Nor can we simply ascribe the dramatic changes in language usage to rampant, wild punning for the purpose of confusing the ubiquitous censors.

Creative manipulation of lexical and grammatical constructions is another way to express ideas that are not permitted under the harsh social controls imposed by the government. ...

Lately, it has become fashionable to use the passive voice with verbs that don't normally allow it and in situations that seem ludicrous. One of the most celebrated examples is bèi zìshā 被自殺 ("be suicided"), with the implication that someone was beaten to death, but the authorities made it look as though he had committed suicide. Once coined, bèi zìshā spread like wildfire, so that it wasn't long before it merited its own entry in online dictionaries and encyclopedias.

more (via Ratty)

WORDS HAVE MEANING: Victor Morton's review of "Police, Adjective" gets the philosophical and theological heft of the movie. But I honestly wasn't perturbed by the "Long Attention-Span Theater" nature of the first 90% of scenes--partly because Morton's review had made me expect a climax, partly bc the tension between everyday tedium and extraordinary suspense is part of the point of the movie, and partly bc the main actor is just so great. Morton says there's too much film where he just slurps soup; I remember thinking that I could watch this specific hangdog working-class antihero slurp soup for hours without getting tired.

For me, the basic experience of the movie was: DEADENINGLY RAW HUMAN EXPERIENCE which is somehow still compelling to watch... do that for a really long time, and often it's funny but every time it's funny it's also cruel. The punctuation of laughter is used really well. ...and then suddenly HOLY CRAP DISTILLED SCENE OF POWER AND HUMILIATION AND (a)THEOLOGY.

So put up with any boredom in the first part--you really need it--because this Jack-in-the-Box coil really is winding up to something shocking and cruel and theologically grisly.

It's playing at the E Street Cinema.

SURVEY, SCHMURVEY: A neat survey of how widespread Yiddish and Hebrew terms are in everyday speech. They're especially looking for non-Jewish participants. I'm skeptical of online surveys as a rule, of course, but this is a fun one, so regardless of its scholarly value it might be interesting to you all.