Someone from Elgin, Illinois (which I figured out by looking up his IP address) just tried to leave this encouraging comment on my contact page:

I just saw your post about Gilbert Bilezikian may I say that you my friend are out to lunch and need to read you bible more careful and instead of speaking out against this wonderful man why not engage him in a  public debate you may learn something from him.

Here’s a corrected edition for easier reading:

I just saw your post about Gilbert Bilezikian. May I say that you, my friend, are out to lunch and need to read your Bible more carefully. Instead of speaking out against this wonderful man, why don’t you engage him in a public debate? You may learn something from him.

I’ve received a couple of comments like this recently, so I thought I’d share some thoughts and give some suggestions for commenting on my blog.

1. Please don’t waste your time trying to leave a comment if you don’t have anything substantive to say. In case you’re wondering, “I think your wrong, you dummy,” is not a substantive comment.
2. I’m not sure why he didn’t leave the comment on the post he had a problem with. At least there it would have been at least somewhat relevant to the page.
3. While the individual did leave his first name, he didn’t leave his last name or a link to anything identifiable. This is hardly more helpful than anonymity. It’s nice to know a little bit about the person you’re having a conversation with (not that he was actually interested in a meaningful conversation).
4. I don’t know the last time I’ve seen so many independent clauses strung together without even using a single comma. If I were a grammar teacher, I’d certainly tuck this one away for my students.
5. I think he’s referring to my post “Hierarchy Does Not Necessitate Opposition.” Instead of engaging my critique of Bilezikian’s (and Giles’s) statement, he makes unfounded accusations. Telling someone he’s out to lunch and needs to read his Bible more carefully doesn’t accomplish much of anything–especially when you’re trying to make a new friend. It may be true, but please demonstrate it with cogent argumentation and careful exegesis.
6. Though I’ve never met him, I don’t doubt that Bilezekian is a wonderful man. But I’m not quite sure what that has to do with the points I brought up in my post. Wonderful men can be horribly wrong.
7. I’m quite certain that if I engaged Dr. Bilezikian in a public debate, I would learn something from him. I learn something from just about everyone whom I engage in a debate. But I’d question whether challenging someone to a public debate is the solution to every disagreement in life. I also doubt that Dr. Bilezikian has either the time or the interest to debate me publicly (or privately).

If you have something to contribute and are interested in edifying dialog, I invite your comments. Otherwise, please don’t waste your (and my) time.

Nope, not Bob Jones this time, for which making national news is fairly commonplace.

Heritage Christian School in Findlay, OH, a ministry of Calvary Baptist Church and the small school where I attended from kindergarten through 12th grade, has been getting a lot of unwarranted bad press over the last few days for suspending a senior who knowingly and willingly disobeyed schools rules—ones he and his parents had agreed to abide by—by attending the local public high school’s prom with his “girlfriend” (in a video interview, the girl said that they’d been dating for all of “a week and a day”).

The story was picked up by a number of news sources:

• The Courier: “Don’t go to prom, school tells teen” (also at Yahoo: “Ohio Christian school tells student to skip prom” and MSNBC “Christian school tells boy to skip prom” via AP)
• Fox Toledo: “Trip to prom could cost student” (a couple of videos)
• WTOL: “Footloose in Ohio: Teen suspended for attending prom” (a couple of videos)
• Fox News: “Christian Ohio School Threatens to Suspend Student If He Goes to Prom“
• Daily Telegraph: “Christian teen faces suspension for going to girlfriend’s prom“

One of the videos is on YouTube and is embedded below.

Heritage has posted an official response on their website. I won’t take the time to offer any thoughts, but will instead just point you to Chris Anderson’s characteristically helpful post.

HT: Valerie Adams (my little sis) and Sharper Iron (via Andy Naselli)

I saw this video this morning and just have to pass it along.

Here’s a transcript of the short exchange:

John Roberts: US News & World Report this week commissioned a poll that surveyed a bunch of women in American asking what role you should take on with your wife as Secretary of State. Thirty-seven percent, the greatest number of women, said, “House husband.” We’re wondering what you think about that.

Bill Clinton: I—well, you know, it’s funny. I told her when she left that I—that I wish now that I was an ordinary citizen, because I wish I could go with her and be there when she comes home at night and do for her what she did for me when I was President. But it’s not in the cards. I’m—we’re doing the best we can to work through this and do the right thing.

John Roberts: Would you ever be comfortable being a house husband?

Bill Clinton: No. I have to go to work. I’m—I’m too much of a Calvinist. If I don’t work every day, I get nervous.

A few brief thoughts:

1. First, I wonder if “it’s not in the cards” and “I’m too much of a Calvinist” have ever been used so closely together before—or even by the same person!
2. Second, the question being discussed around the blogosphere is what Clinton meant by Calvinist in this statement. My theory is that he’s seen the attention that Driscoll has received lately (e.g., Nightline and CNN) and thought perhaps claiming the label Calvinist could help him become more popular, too! (BTW, I’m not being serious.)
3. Finally, I don’t think I’ve ever before been so tempted to consider becoming an Arminian. :)

HT: Aaron Sauer

Though most people don’t know (or care when told), the correct character to use for a range of numbers is the en dash (–), not the hyphen (-). Even if you’re committed to using en dashes between digits, hyphens are a tad easier to type,¹ making a find and replace necessary at some point. If you’re diligent and use the en dash faithfully, you will undoubtedly get a rogue hyphen in there somewhere if you do any copying and pasting from the internet or other documents that don’t consistently use the correct character.

A simple find and replace (- for –) would do the trick—if you wanted to replace all hyphens with en dashes. But you don’t want to do this, since hyphens in hyphenated words are correct. :) Alternatively, you could run that query but, instead of replacing them all at once, replace one at a time only the ones that appear between digits. But this could be time consuming on a large document like a dissertation. Another option would be to set up a query to find 0-0 and replace it with 0–0, then 0-1 with 0–1 and so forth, but that would require 100 different searches and probably take longer than the previous method! The previous method could probably be simplified by dropping the second digit since there aren’t likely to be any instances when you’d have a digit followed by a hyphen not followed by another digit. That would make only 10 find-and-replace queries. So this is as least doable, though still not ideal.

Fortunately, there is a better solution than any of these.

What we want to do is find any single digit followed by a hyphen followed by another single digit and replace the hyphen with an en dash, leaving the digits unchanged. I tried to use the special digit character, ^#, and came up with a query like find ^#-^# and replace it with ^#–^#, but this didn’t work because ^# is not valid in the replace field.

I knew there had to be a way to do it, but I couldn’t figure it out. So I went to Google and found my answer in just a minute or two.

Here’s what you do:

1. In the “Find what” field, enter ([0-9])-([0-9]).
2. In the “Replace with” field, enter \1–\2 (note that that’s an en dash, not a hyphen).
3. Check the box “Use wildcards.”
4. Click “Replace All.”

That’s it. Much easier than any of the other methods. See the article for more details and an explanation of the search syntax.

Footnotes

1. To type an en dash in Word, you can either use the default key combination Ctrl + – (the one on the keypad) or create your own shortcut. My shortcut is Ctrl + – (the one on the main part of the keyboard). ↩

A new Gallup Poll evaluates states according to their religiousness.

Want to be almost certain you’ll have religious neighbors? Move to Mississippi. Prefer to be in the least religious state? Venture to Vermont.

A new Gallup Poll, based on more than 350,000 interviews, finds that the Magnolia State is the one where the most people — 85% — say yes when asked “Is religion an important part of your daily life?”

Less than half of Vermonters, meanwhile — 42% — answered that same question in the affirmative.

. . .

Overall, Gallup researchers found that 65% of all Americans said religion was important in their daily lives.

The top six most religious states were

1. Mississippi (85%)
2. Alabama (82%)
3. South Carolina (80%) [We used to live here.]
4. Tennessee (79%)
5. Louisiana (78%)
6. Arkansas (78%)

The top six least religious states were

1. Vermont (42%)
2. New Hampshire (46%)
3. Maine (48%)
4. Massachusetts (48%)
5. Alaska (51%)
6. Washington (52%) [Now we live here.]

USA Today has the details. The complete list of all 50 states is in the left sidebar.

HT: Cory Miller

A blog post at the City Room Blog at NYTimes.com has received some attention this week. In “Is That an Emoticon in 1862?” the author explores whether a ;) in a transcript of a Lincoln speech is an emoticon or a typo. Some are convinced that this is the earliest example of an emoticon. Most seem to think it’s simply a typo in the form of accidental transposition (e.g., see the comments here and here).

Here’s an image of the text under discussion:

It reads,

the front of the platform and spoke as follows :

THE PRESIDENT’S SPEECH.

Fellow-Citizens : I believe there is no precedent for
my appearing before you on this occasion, [applause]
but it is also true that there is no precedent for your
being here yourselves, (applause and laughter ;) and
I offer, in justification of myself and of you, that,
upon examination, I have found nothing in the Con-
stitution against. [Renewed applause.] I, however,
have an impression that there are younger gentlemen

Looks like an emoticon, huh? ;)¹

However, as anyone familiar with the King James Version (or the American Standard Version) would realize, it’s actually neither an early example of an emoticon or a typo of any sort. It was perfectly suitable as little as 100 years go to include semicolons, colons, and commas at the end of parenthetical items inside the closing parenthesis.

Take this example from Ephesians 2:4–10 KJV:

4 But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, 5 Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;) 6 And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus: 7 That in the ages to come he might shew the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us through Christ Jesus. 8 For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: 9 Not of works, lest any man should boast. 10 For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.

The editors of this edition of the KJV were not joking about salvation being by grace.

This is hardly an isolated instance. The KJV has 54 occurrences of ;)² and 39 occurrences of :)³.

Likewise, the ASV has 18 occurrences of ;)⁴ and 3 occurrences of :)⁵.

You’ll also find numerous instances of a comma before a closing parenthesis. For more examples of all three, see the Darby Bible.

So putting punctuation marks like semicolons, colons, and commas within parentheses at the end of the parenthetical text was quite common a century ago. When that fell out of practice, I’m not sure. What’s clear is that it is ludicrous to consider this an emoticon or a typo.

HT: Tommy Keene

Footnotes

1. Two pieces of evidence that the author of the blog post tries to use in favor of the emoticon view are (1) the switch from brackets to parentheses and (2) the space before the semicolon. Both are easily refuted. (1) There are other scattered uses of parentheses in the complete transcript of the speech, so this is not an isolated instance in an attempt to make a smiley face. (2) It was common to put a half space before colons and semicolons in that time period, as an analysis of the complete transcript and other literature from the time readily demonstrates. ↩
2. Gen 14:8; Lev 18:27; Num 14:13; 31:46; Deut 2:29; 3:9; 4:31; 5:5; 21:23; Judg 9:18; 1 Sam 22:6; 1 Kings 8:14, 39, 41, 42; 12:2; 2 Kings 22:14; 1 Chr 7:15; 18:10; 26:10; Neh 6:1; 8:5; 9:29; Esth 1:14; 2:12; 9:1; Job 30:5; 31:18; 32:16; Jer 29:2; Eze 16:23; Mark 5:13; 15:41; Luke 2:23; 23:51; John 2:9; 7:22; Rom 2:15; 9:11; 11:8; 2 Cor 9:10; 10:4; 12:2, 3; Gal 1:1; Eph 2:5; 5:9; 6:2; Col 2:22; 4:10; 1 Tim 2:7; Heb 10:23; 2 Pet 2:8; 1 John 1:2. ↩
3. Gen 49:24; Ex 23:15; 30:13; 32:25; Lev 24:11; Num 3:47; 34:2; Deut 29:17; Judg 1:10; 2 Sam 14:26; 1 Kings 11:16; 11:29; 2 Kings 7:13; 5:4; 1 Chr 5:2; 6:10; 2 Chr 5:12; 6:30; 34:22; Esth 1:1; Job 8:9; Ps 7:4; 49:7; Eccl 8:16; Jer 42:2; 52:7; Matt 6:31; 24:15; Mark 6:14; Luke 2:4; John 6:23; Acts 10:36; 18:2; Rom 10:6; 2 Cor 5:7; Gal 2:6; Heb 7:21; 11:38; 12:21. ↩
4. Ex 30:13; Deut 3:9; 5:5; 15:4; 1 Kings 8:39; 1 Chr 18:10; 2 Chr 5:12; 6:13, 21; 34:22; Nehemiah 6:1; 8:5; Ps 7:4; 49:7; Jer 52:7; Ezek 5:15; 45:14; 47:1. ↩
5. Ex 4:4; 1 Chr 5:2; Rom 10:6. ↩