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Following the Episcopal Church's 1976 decision to ordain women, Catholic leaders in America and Rome were approached by Episcopal clergy who opposed the decision and sought conversion as a result.

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On a beautiful Saturday recently, my daughter and I broke a rule or statute, I’m not sure which. I don’t think it was the law we broke, and I doubt there would have been a stiff penalty had we been caught. True confessions time – we took our dog, Winston to the dog park. Why is that a problem? Because Winston was banned from the local dog park a few years ago.

He’s a very friendly, yet stupid dog who has no spatial awareness and is completely unconcerned with the personal bubble of others – dog or human. The last time we took him there, a Weimaraner pup intrigued him. They chased each other around for a while until suddenly, the dog was gone. To the shock of the other owner, Winston had decided to use him as a chaise lounge. We ran toward him, screaming for him to get off. But he just cocked his head contentedly, unconcerned with us while seated on his comfy new chair.

The other owner just happened to be in charge of the dog park. Her dog was fine after we got our oaf off of him. But Winston’s picture went up on the dog equivalent of the post office wall as a canine non grata.

But on this day, with no other dog in the over 35 lb yard, we decided to let him in. He sniffed around, ran some, and paraded along the fence separating him from the little dogs. I guess he decided it wasn’t worth being where he wasn’t welcome because he peed on the bench then sat by the gate, ready to leave.

There are places I’ve let my feet wander in the past that I shouldn’t go back to. We are all tempted by something. Whether you are a believer or not, there are actions that are wrong and would cause injury to your health, family, or freedom if you undertook them. I know what tempts me. Fortunately, I have a little more self-control than I did as a young man.

I heard a pastor once say that our greatest weakness can be our curiosity. We know the line we won’t cross, and have a resolute desire to stay away. Yet too often, we draw the line and inch our toes as close as they can possibly be to it, lean in to see what is going on over there, and then act surprised when we fall into the same old sin and self-destructive behavior.

♦

What tempts you? What lines have you drawn and where are your feet? These are not questions to answer in the comments section, just something for you and I to think about as we navigate life’s dog park.

Good for Winston, he just peed on it and walked away. I pray I can treat my temptations with the same indifference.

First off, I read Gunpowder by Joe Hill. A dark sci-fi novella in which Hill introduces us to a group of children genetically engineered to terraform a planet with their special skills. The characterisation is outstanding (who couldn't love Charley, and Jake, and Niles etc). The plot builds steadily, growing darker with each breath. The conclusion is satisfying and lingers with you for days. For a more indepth, infinitely better review head over to The Fix. Oh, and it's selling out fast. The signed copies (drat, I was too slow) sold out before publication and I doubt the trade edition will be in stock much longer as it is limited to 500 copies.

Next up was issue 1 of Murky Depths. They are currently up to issue 7 (my copy arrived today, but as I''m yet to read number 6 it will have to wait awhile), and I received a copy of issue 1 free when I signed up for a subscription. It's a beautifully produced magazine with a mixture of comic strips and short stories, and there's not a dud in the whole magazine. My favourite stories were Looking In, Looking Out by Gareth D Jones - I defy anyone not to feel at least a twinge of sadness at the end - and CyberRevenge Inc. by Eugie Foster (which left me with the sweats as I'm convinced the story I currently have subbed with Murky Depths, 'PlasticineCoffins.com', is too similar, although it has nothing to do with revenge and Foster's story had no plasticine people in it - sigh).

Finally, I read Tainted, an anthology edited by Aaron Polson. It's always a little harder plugging a book/story/magazine by someone you know. It feels tainted (no pun intended), but I couldn't let this little gem gather dust on my shelf without mentioning it at least once. My favourite story was Fish Balls and Mushrooms by Natalie L Sin - and again, as I know and admire Natalie it feels a bit like - well of course she would say that, but bare in mind I also have a blog acquaintance with several others on the TOC and although I enjoyed their stories they didn't make number one - sticks tongue out and runs away. The stories in Tainted where inspired by stories from Poe, Blackwood, Bierce, Wells and Benson. Of the old masters, my favourite story was E.F. Benson's The Caterpillars.

Long ago, after this blog had barely come into being (Spring 2006), I wrote an essay titled “Living in Sin.” It was about the origin of the word sin. Such abstract categories as sin, shame, and guilt develop from thinking about situations in which people realize that they have done something wrong or covered themselves with disgrace, and every now and then the inner form of the words coined for such purposes is transparent. The idea of sin in its Christian sense was alien to the Germanic peoples before the conversion, and in Gothic, a language mainly known to us from a 4^th-century translation of the New Testament, the word for “sin” is frawaurhts, literally “misdeed” (fra- is a prefix of “destructive semantics,” as in Engl. forgo “relinquish,” and -waurhts is akin to Engl. wrought). Nor does transgression, from Old French, ultimately from Latin, pose any problems: it means overstepping what is allowed. But sin is a short word, and how it came to mean what it does is unclear, the more so because the speakers of Old English had forwyrht, an exact cognate of the Gothic noun. Apparently, sin (at that time, syn or synn) and forwyrht referred to different things. Those who are interested in knowing some conjectures on sin are welcome to read my old post. Shame and guilt are no less opaque than sin; shame is especially hard.

Native English words with sh- once began with sk-, and, indeed, the Old English for shame is scamu. The last sound (u) was an ending, while m could be a suffix because sca-m-u had a close synonym sca-nd-u. Scandu and its cognates have continued into modern languages; Germans still say Scham und Schande to express their disgust. Modern English lacks its reflex (if we disregard the archaic participle shent “ruined, disgraced”), but, by way of compensation, in the United States scam appeared in the sixties of the 20^th century, as if from nowhere. All dictionaries dismiss it demurely as being “of obscure origin.” If we are unable to trace such a recent coinage to its source, how good is the chance of success in dealing with an ancient word? The chance is probably not very good, but sometimes the remoter the period, the easier it is to advance hypotheses. For example, if scam had emerged in Middle English, there would have been no doubt that it was a borrowing from Scandinavian (Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish have skam “shame”), and the meanings could have been aligned without much difficulty (“scam is a shameful thing”). 17^th-century scam would have been more problematic since the best period for absorbing Scandinavian words was the Middle Ages. Present day Engl. scam leaves us stranded: it is definitely not a continuation of a word from the language of the Vikings! Hence the unanimous verdict “of unknown/uncertain origin.” Even sham, originally “trick, fraud,” which is clearly English (it begins with sh-), baffles researchers. Although it sounds like shame, it may have nothing to do with it. Despite all such hurdles there is no harm in trying to guess how shame acquired its meaning.

Since shame refers to the diminution of honor, it has been compared with the Old English adjective scam “short” (what an etymon for our scam!), from whose Old Norse cognate skamt English has scant. However, a much more popular hypothesis looks for a different root. In the old Indo-European languages, the prefix s- existed. It was an evasive entity. Roots existed with and without it, and its presence did not affect the word’s meaning. The same almost parasitic s (called s-mobile “movable s”) has been recorded in modem English dialects: some people say climb, others say sclimb. The main sound change that separates all the Germanic languages from its other Indo-European neighbors is the so-called First Consonant Shift: compare Latin pater, tres, and quod (that is, kwod) versus Engl. father, three, and what (from hw-). The quod/hwat pair shows that Germanic h corresponds to non-Germanic k. But in the group sk the consonant k was not affected by the shift. For instance, Latin had scabere “scratch,” and its Gothic cognate was skaban “shear.” As a result, some words going back to different languages sound nearly alike: scabies is from Latin, scab is from Scandinavian (Germanic), and their English siblings are shabby and shave. This digression was necessary to show that if a Germanic word begins with sk-, it may have variants with initial k- (the same root minus s-mobile), while its non-Germanic cognates may begin with h- (k regularly shifted) and sk- (in which k avoided the shift). This is why prefixed words like Old Engl. -hama “covering” and Gothic -hamon “get dressed” have been suggested as cognates of scamu “shame.” The idea was that the Germanic word for shame expressed the embarrassment of being naked.

Such a development is probable. A person could not experience a greater indignity than being caught by his enemies and stripped of his clothes. The god Othin (Odin) says in a mythological poem from medieval Scandinavia: “When I saw two scarecrows in a field,/ I covered them with clothes;/ they looked like warriors when they were dressed/—who hails a naked hero?” In the Slavic languages, styd- “shame” is related to stud- “cold,” which seems to give support to the scamu—hama etymology. But if hama (to stay with Old English forms) is a cognate of scamu, could it not be expected to mean “clothes”? Yet we have a huge zigzag: from “clothes” to “unclothed” and to the disgrace caused by not having anything to wear, all of it within the narrow confines of a short root. The phonetic part (hama ~ scamu) is flawless, but the semantic leap is “scarcely credible,” as dictionaries say in such circumstances. Another possibility is to compare scam- and Gothic hamfs “maimed,” a word that has an impeccable Greek cognate, though mutilation need not presuppose shame.

The inevitable conclusion appears to be “origin uncertain/debatable,” but I cannot finish my story without one more reference. The Italian scholar Vittore Pisani pointed to the noun eskamitu in an inscription on an Inguvian table (we are dealing here with an ancient Indo-European language of Italy). It means “genitals,” and Pisani compared it with the Germanic word for “shame.” The obscure Italic word may provide a clue more reliable than any other. Shame and genitals form an indissoluble union from time immemorial (this has been, of course, what gave rise to the “dress” etymology: the horror lay in being fully exposed). We may never be able to find out why the sound complex skam- came to designate what it did, but, if eskamitu has been interpreted correctly, reconstructing the development from “private parts” to “shame” looks like our best choice.

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