Through A Glass, Dimly

And the word of the day is: Homoioteleuton (ho-mee-oh-te-loot’-on)

Roughly, “same ending”.  A homoioteleuton is two lines of text in which the ending is the same. For example:

1  The very tall man was walking
2  down the well-lit city street
3  where the woman was talking
4  to a little girl.

During the copying of manuscripts, this can result in recognizable kind of copying error: Skipping a section of the text.

In this example, if you’re copying the text, it would be easy to skip lines 2 & 3.  You copy line 1, and when your eyes go back to the page, you accidentally go back to the end of line 3 instead of the end of line 1.  You end up with “The very tall man was walking to a little girl.”

This can be very useful to textual critics, trying to figure out which manuscript has the original reading.  If you have two manuscripts (A and B), and A reads 1,4 while B reads 1,2,3,4, you can be pretty sure what happened.  “Oh,” you say, “the scribe skipped those lines because of the similar ending homoioteleuton.”

There are lots of words used in theology that are somewhat obscure but very fun.  I would like to share one:

“Prolegomenon” — Roughly, “first things”

It’s pronounced like it’s spelled.  Which will take you a second to figure out.  Pro-leh-gah-meh-non. (The plural is prolegomena.)

The prolegomona of a topic are the things you have to talk about first, before you get into anything else.  For instance, “This systematic theology text will begin with the prolegomena of  theology: How we come to know anything, where we should get our theology, and how we can go about learning theology from the Scripture.”  Your initial training for a new job could be called the prolegomenon, too.

It’s a great word.  I’m sure you’ll start using it in every-day conversation.