Prophecy: a pet peeve of mine

All right, I'm going to put my anal-retentive editor's cap on and set everyone straight now. I'm tired of people arguing about prophets and prophecies and not knowing how to use the relevant lingo properly. I personally am not even interested in prophecy any more, and I know how to do this. I feel you should be required to know the basic terminology of a subject before you argue about it, and yet the misuses of terminology are as common as the proper usages (and, yes, that may be a shamelessly fabricated anecdotal statistic, but it is pretty close). I realize that not many of us have been properly instructed in this area, and learning by example has taught many of us the wrong way, so please do not take this personally - it's not intended that way. All the same, I am here to set the record straight. So, here it is:Prophet: NOUN. One divinely inspired to share special knowledge or predictions with the human race.
Ex: "Jeff is a prophet. I know because he told me so."Prophecy: NOUN, I repeat, NOUN. The last syllable is pronounced "SEE". Meaning: a piece or pieces of information, predictions, or other sayings uttered by a PROPHET. See above.
Ex: "Jeff gave us a prophecy, saying 'such and such shall come to pass in some place, and things will be done to stuff by people.' And there was great rejoicing."Prophesy: VERB, I repeat, and I repeat again, VERB. The last syllable is pronounced "SIGH"! Meaning: to utter a prophecy or prophecies; to do what prophets do.
Ex: "Jeff prophesied unspeakably horrific doom to all who failed to heed his grammatical doctrine."Prophesize, prophesise, prophecied, et cetera: ARE NOT REAL WORDS! THEY DO NOT EXIST! DO NOT USE THEM OR I WILL KICK YOUR EVER-LOVING @$$!!!I hope all of this is perfectly clear. Starting tomorrow, angels with flaming swords will be posted at the forum entrances, and there will be a test....

...and we all salute you. Or at least I do

Man, I totally prophescized taht this would happen. buncha smartass replize like yousual.

...of course, in my case, "pedantic asshole" works just as well

Hehe... well, I try to avoid publicizing it too much, but it's the Truth.

You too, huh? Are you a Jeff? Well, i guess there's room for more than one in the house.This message has been edited by zephyr, 05-11-2005 01:12 PM

In other news, the S&P 500 is down today, due to some prophet-taking....

I can handle humor, but serious off-topic posts are just too much for me - especially ones with random italics that go off on nautical tangents. It was very poetic, however.