Cultural Illiteracy (or: "Glad I'm not on trial for witchcraft!")

[capri0mni]

(another tangential NaNoWriMo post):

One of the fun things for me about writing this NaNo novel, this year, is letting my imagination run wild, and wonder what sort of splinter-group culture might branch off from today's Dominionism movement over the next 150 years, or so, especially with the idea that this splinter-group (which even present-day Dominionists might consider nutcases) is obsessed with the idea of vampires in our midst, and has tried to completely cut itself off from mainstream society, and living in self-segregated ghettos... It's great fun for me to come up with passages from their fire-and-brimstone pamphlets about exactly why no one but other members of their sect are to be trusted -- especially not the news media, or the scientists.

Anyway -- just now, I got the idea that they would have come up with a special spin-off of the Lord's Prayer, to recite if you suspect a vampire is after you... And half-way through, I realized I was no longer exactly sure how the real Lord's Prayer ended, and had to log on to look it up on Wikipedia, just now (I got it right, mostly. It was just the unofficial coda at the end I was forgetting). I no longer consider myself Christian, but still. It's one of the things a person should know by heart, like knowing that Judaism is older than Christianity, and what the Socratic Method is, and why it's called that.. I used to be able to rattle it right off.... but ... oops.

:::Hangs head in Shame:::

Okay, back to writing....

Comments

[indefatigable42.livejournal.com]

Hmm... from what I remember, different churches had different versions. I grew up Anglican and I seem to remember being surprised by the version that the Catholic church used -- I would try to recite it along with them and I'd trip up because the words were different.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Yeah, there are four different versions listed in the Wikipedia article, in the English language, alongside the Greek and the one used in the Latin Mass.

But the gist and general structure are pretty much the same, even if the translations of individual words are different, and for a while there, this afternooon, I could not remember what came after "Give us, this day our daily bread" -- took a while to remember that the bit about trespass and temptation were part of that prayer, too, and not something else.