in the interest of serendipity, i have decided to write a truly random sermon this week. i will open my dictionary, without looking, to a random page & drop a highlighter on it. whatever word is marked will be the subject of this week's sermon.

here goes...

the highlighter happened to hit the word "jest". which reminds me: a friend of mine from college enjoyed hanging with me & my other friends (at least in part) because of our vocabulary skills. it was one of those teachers' dreams: she truly enjoyed to learn from us. unfortunately, she generally just liked the learning so that she could flaunt these words she'd learned to others who might not know them. it was an exclusionary thing: "i know what facetious means, so i'm better than you" & all that. eventually this practice deteriorated to the point where whenever she'd visit she'd ask us for a big word to impress people with, as though it were our duty to keep her literate. "jest" was one of those "big words" we taught her; later on she even read that infinite jest book, by a guy named something like "charles foster wallace" (sp?).

unfortunately, "jest" is not a very good topic for a sermon. for one thing, practically all the sermons are done at least slightly in jest. & besides, that's the only interesting jest story i have.

luckily, highlighter ink (especially the blue variety, which i used in this test) is famous for going all the way through paper (especially thin-ass dictionary paper). so what is marked on the mirror side? what word on the verso lurks behind the recto "jest"? i'm afraid the word is "jew".

that's another word which wouldn't make for a great sermon. i don't know that many jews. i've met a few, but i couldn't tell you how they're any different than people raised christian or agnostic or anything else. it's all the same, really. the only interesting aspect of the dictionary listing for "jew" is that, at the end, it contains definitions for "jew" used as an adjective or verb (both are marked as "offensive", which they clearly are, & would seem more suited to a slang dictionary than to the random house webster's college dix).

it seems that chance has failed me. it's pretty sad, too, considering some of the really cool words that appear even on the same page with jest & jew. words such as "jazz shoe" (a soft shoe worn by dancers), "jeepney" (a twin-benched jitney bus used in the phillipines), "jejune" (1: lacking interest or significance, 2: lacking maturity, 3: lacking nutritive elements), "jiggery-pokery" (trickery) & all sorts of interesting proper names & other old standards such as "jerk".

that's the real drawback to relying on chance. sometimes it screws you. sometimes you take a chance & you end up with rambling gibberish about what's on what page of the dictionary. goodbye, pulitzer prize! it was nice never knowing you!

but then again, everything'll screw you from time to time. random chance really isn't any worse than the most structured of plans. because a plan can always go wrong. the more precise a plan, the more ways it can go wrong. randomness, by definition, cannot go wrong. how can it, if you don't know what the result will be?

it doesn't matter. the point is that i performed an experiment, for good or bad. now it's up to the researchers, the scientific community, to analyze the results, tabulate them, & write an article for nature.