New product: new name. So it was that Karl von Reichenbach, having invented a new product, also invented a name for it – paraffin. He combined two Latin words parum and affinis to describe the waxy substance we are more familiar with in its liquid form. We also call it kerosene and fuel jet-engines with it. (The two Latin words define paraffin as being chemically neutral.)
Something similar happened when the diesel engine was invented. What should it be called? The answer was provided by Rudolf Diesel, who invented the compression-ignition engine that now powers ships, trains and generators and provided his own name for it.
Anybody setting out to translate the Bible into English finds words that are virtually untranslatable. Everybody knows shalom, meaning peace as not just the absence of war but the experience of enjoying favour and encouragement.
A stroke of genius came the way of Miles Coverdale when he was translating the Bible into English. He needed a word to translate the Hebrew word chesed. Steadfast love does the job quite well; do does mercy or constant, covenant love; but Coverdale (who had little knowledge of Hebrew) went one better and came up with a new word ‘loving-kindness’. It occurs innumerable times in the King James Version of the Psalms.
When we think of great works that were never completed, works like Chaucer’s ’Canterbury Tales’, Beauvais Cathedral or the Cape to Cairo railway, we need a good word to describe a completed task. Coverdale’s coinage has that within it. God’s loving-kindness endures; it does not falter or evaporate. It goes on to the end until the job is done. Its New Testament equivalent is charis (in English ‘grace’). Luther used the same German word to translate chesed and charis. Every time we use either word we acknowledge that God is the originator of all the good things we enjoy, light, faith, forgiveness. Matthew 12.20 contains a lovely example of the same idea.
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