Glossary: Headword Sources

Glossary of American English Hacker Theocratese

Back Top Forward

blue line

Headword Sources

This Glossary is provided for pleasurable entertainment. Although I have tried my best to write well, to be accurate, and to treat the subject matter with the greatest respect and dignity, the Glossary is not intended as spiritual food or as weighty instruction in Bible truth. Christians depend on the {faithful and discreet slave} for this.

The Glossary in no way supersedes, replaces, competes with, emulates, corrects, or criticizes the content of anything published by the {Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society}. The Society's dignified publications address the reader with the fatherly voice of Jehovah God by means of Jesus' faithful and discreet slave. This lowly Glossary addresses the reader with the tongue-in-cheek voice of Lynn. Like a dictionary, it is not intended to dictate policy, but merely to document one man's study of the state of a cultural practice.

The master list of headword entries was compiled from many sources. For the most part I used my memory, noting things I had heard as they came to mind or as they popped up in conversation, at meetings, or in the {literature}. The Glossary has now been seen and read at least in part by thousands of people. Many readers of earlier editions have sent me headwords, suggesting that I use them. I also combed the index in the book Jehovah's Witnesses---Proclaimers of God's Kingdom.

Some terms become ingrained in our way of communicating through repeated hearing. Jehovah's Witnesses all read the same literature and hear essentially the same {assembly} and {convention} programs. Our language is shaped in part by expressions found in the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures. (See {faithful and discreet slave}, {great crowd}.) A memorable illustration or turn of phrase might be published in a magazine. Images stick in the mind and are reused, sometimes so much that they become clichés.

As you read you may notice that some headwords are references to concepts, ideas, or practices. (See {politically correct speech}, {beard}, {first initial}, {applause}.) This is another aspect in which this work has stepped beyond the scope of a word book.

Most of this Glossary was written before the existence and entirely without the assistance of the Society's Watchtower Library on {CD-ROM}.[7] But I do possess a largish {online} collection of the Society's literature scanned into ASCII text files. I refer to this collection many times as my online literature. It was used for many of the examples, and as the source of information about term counts. Comments about counts are now largely irrelevant in light of the CD-ROM resource.[8]

[7] Because I don't have one, nor a {PC} to use it on.
[8] In fact, it is safe to assume most counts would be significantly higher if I used the CD-ROM for searches.

This Glossary contains almost no entries for the names of individuals or places mentioned in the Bible. It discusses only a few topics that are covered in our Bible encyclopedia Insight on the Scriptures. [it]

Although this book deals with American English speech, I have included a few Briticisms, i.e., expressions used by those other English-speaking people who reside in the British Isles. Every one was given to me by a Brit, and was previously unknown by me. There are significant differences in the idioms we use, so I decided to include a small sampling. As author George Bernard Shaw once said:

Britain and the United States are two countries
separated by a common language.

blue line

Back Top Forward


Glossary: Headword Sources