The Chaos

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Feoffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.

Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.

Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation -- think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, which rhymes with enough --
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

Dr. Gerald Nolst Trenite (1870-1946),
a Dutch observer of English.

For the love of the English language

You Think English is Easy?
Try and read these sentences right the first time.

1) The bandage was wound around the wound.
2) The farm was used to produce produce.
3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
4) We must polish the Polish furniture.
5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.
6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present .
8) A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
10) I did not object to the object.
11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row .
13) They were too close to the door to close it.
14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.
15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
18) Upon seeing the tear in the painting, I shed a tear.
19) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
20) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
Let's face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant, nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France . Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth, beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell?

How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out, and in which an alarm goes off by going on.

English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race, which, of course, is not a race at all. That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible.

PS. - Why doesn't "Buick" rhyme with "quick"

You lovers of the English language might enjoy this.

There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that is "UP."

It's easy to understand UP , meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP ? At a meeting, why does a topic come UP ? Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report ?

We call UP our friends. And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver; warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car . At other times the little word has real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses. To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special.

And this UP is confusing: A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP . We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.

We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP ! To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP , look the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4th of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions. If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP , you may wind UP with a hundred or more. When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP . When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP .

When it rains, it wets the earth and often messes things UP.

When it doesn't rain for awhile, things dry UP .

We could go on, but I'll wrap it UP , for now my time is UP , so... Time to shut UP!

Prostitution is unjustifiable

published on Sunday Standard [18.02.2007] here

Dear Editor

This article is in part a response to Eddie Mdluli’s opinion on prostitution, but it is also an attempt to address the broader subject of prostitution.

While Mdluli claims to tackle the subject from ‘the standpoint of some research’ this is not evident, save ‘driving past by some prostitutes on some of our roads’ which he did.

His article reads like Ivan Vladislavic’s Restless Supermarket.

At one level, he asserts, “As a Christian, I am not for Prostitution,” Yet he extols its virtues.
The truth is that Mdluli rests content with a superficial kind of social analysis which glorifies the imagined benefits of prostitution and fails to grapple its underlying causes and negative outcomes.

Prostitution justifications appear like freezing ladies of the night – dressed in cheap dark fur coats of excuses and counterfeits of glittering pendants of misinformation. The argument patterns are the same: The Problem excuse: Prostitutes are at a high risk of contracting HIV and developing Aids.

Solution: Legalise prostitution so that prostitutes could come out of the shadows and have access to condoms and counselling without fear of victimisation and arrest. The Benefit excuse: Prostitution is beneficial to the prostitute and the society. The prostitute gets paid for selling her body; the society benefits from taxing whatever money she makes and exploiting her sexually. Everybody wins – it falsely appears!

However, our views on the subject are influenced by our position on the three issues: First is our perception of the value and sanctity of the human body. Is the human body naturally anything special that needs protecting or can be violated, sold in sex or slavery or lacerated in any way? Second is our understanding of sex. Is sex an animal instinct which could be gratified on the basis of one’s Pula power? Third, what is our moral reference point? On what basis do we determine wrong or right? – What Mdluli terms hiding behind ethics. Is our moral standard the theory of evolution; that we are on earth by chance, having come through evolution and having survived through that old-fashioned tired maxim ‘survival of the fittest’. Is our moral reference in philosophers like the humanist Descartes with his declarative “I think, therefore I am”; David Hume; the agnostic, Immanuel Kant, or Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist with his famous credo ‘Travel, polygamy and transparency’? Or do we turn to faith, such as Christianity, as a standard against which to live our lives?

Prostitution cannot be justified on the basis that it is an old profession – George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession – nor on the basis of its benefits – the end can never justify the means.

Crime, pilfering, thieving, corruption and assassination are equally old professions, and equally iniquitous. Gangsters and paedophiles trading in drugs and child pornography make unimaginable wealth. However, their ‘benefits’ don’t dope us into justifying their evil exploits.

If the human body is nothing but flesh, as some thinkers argue, then a price tag on it may be appropriate. It may be built a brothel inside on which sex-thirsty men feast – the Pula-fit feasting on the Pula-weak. Marxists should be appalled, and yet most remain silent. Feminists should be revolted, yet most stay hushed. An iniquitous activity can never be purified by clean surroundings and condom use.

Mr Mdluli, prostitution and marriage don’t mix. At the heart of marriage definition is exclusivity. The English poet William Blake in his famous poem, London, has shown that prostitution turns the blessings of marriage into death and decay resulting in a sense of increased despair, when he says “.....the youthful Harlot’s curse/...plagues the Marriage hearse”.

What is worrisome in our anti-Aids campaign is that the original national campaign of ABC (abstinence, be faithful and condomise) has been overshadowed by a gigantic C of condom-use, relegating the message of abstinence and faithfulness to mythology. I am persuaded of the need to resuscitate the ABC campaign giving equal focus to abstinence and faithfulness as to condom-use.

Huge funds have been poured into condom purchase, distribution and literature on their proper use. No resources have been set aside into teaching this society faithfulness and abstinence. That’s a grave mistake which this nation has started paying for heavily. Consequently, sexual activity is found amongst primary school pupils while unfaithfulness remains pervasive across the society.

Tackling the prostitution matter requires diverse strategies. At one level, its resolution will encompass resolving the Zimbabwean impasse for many prostitutes in both Gaborone and Francistown are Zimbabwean girls squeezed out of their country by Mugabe’s misrule. At another level, we should take a holistic approach and tackle national issues that in part engender prostitution: amongst these being unemployment, urban migration, poverty, female abuse, and moral degeneration.

I see no study which documents the spread of prostitution in Botswana. Is it an urban malady or insidiously spread nationally? Its causes are still to be diagnosed and treated.

Thapelo Otlogetswe
Gaborone

Some pictures from Brighton

Rosey, Shinie, myself and Steve Walford. Above is the lead elder, Peter Brooks.
Shinie and Stuart Townend
Shinie with Matt Redman

The many faces of baby Lobopo-Tyrone!

Lobopo! yes, he is bigger now 5 months!

So long

It's shocking how long I haven't updated this blog! Here are some pics from the past few months. We have a baby boy! Lobopo-Tyrone, was born December 7th, 2006 weighing at 4kgs. He is 6 weeks and weighs 5.8kg now. The picture below was taken when he was 12hrs

My dog, Charles (5 months), has grown too.

Prostitution has no place in our society

Prostitution has no place in our society  

For the past few months an argument has been raging on the possible legalization of prostitution in the country. The argument has taken different forms and has sadly been entertained by reasonable people amongst them medical practitioners, members of parliament and some UB academics. At the heart of the argument are three issues. First, is the value and sanctity of the human body. Is the human body naturally anything special that needs protecting or can be violated, sold in sex or slavey or lacerated in any way? Second, is our understanding of sex. Is sex an animal instinct which could be gratified on the basis of one’s Pula power? Third, what is our moral reference point or moral standard? On what basis do we determine wrong or right? Is our moral standard ‘the ape-man’ theory of evolution; that we are merely on earth by chance, having come through evolution and having survived through that old-fashioned tired maxim ‘survival of the fittest’. Or our moral reference in philosophers like the humanist Rene Discartes with his declarative “I think, therefore I am”; David Hume; the agnostic, Immanuel Kant, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzshe, Bertrand Russell (whose life can be summarised by the word ‘contradition’), or Jean-Paul Sartre, the existentialist with his famous credo ‘Travel, polygamy and transparency’. Or do we turn to faith, Christianity, as a standard against which to live our lives?

Turning to the first question the Christian view tends to be fairly straightforward. It affirms the sanctity of the human body by arguing that humanity was created in the image of God. It argues that the human body is a temple of the Holy Spirit demanding care and preservation. But one may question why such a Christian view should matter in Botswana since not everyone in the country professes to be Christian. We are a secular state, some argue. The Christian view should matter if the statistic that 70% of the country is Christian is true. Any well functioning democracy will take into cognisance the dominant view of its population. The 70% never voted for a secular view.

If on the other hand the human body is nothing but flesh, mere meat, as some philosophers and certain thinkers argue, then a price tag can be easily fixed on it. It can be built a brothel in which sex-thirsty men one after another, repeatedly come and feast on it – the Pula-fit feasting on the Pula-weak. Have we as a nation lowered the value of the human body that we could argue that a price tag be put to it. Marxists should be appalled, and yet most remain silent! Have we so turned our backs on moral principles that we argue not only on putting the female body for sale, but also musing on how we can tax profits of such appalling transactions? While South Africa has set a moral regeneration board, some of our country’s top minds are arguing for moral degeneration laws. They are wrestling with the question: “How can we reconfigure reality to accommodate human passions?” God help us! If on the contrary we value females in our society and see them for what they are, people created in the image of God. If we love them as sisters, as daughters, as mothers and as friends, we will work to eradicate those conditions which have pushed some into prostitution.

On the second question of sex, the Christian view affirms sex as the intimacy builder to marriage. It doesn’t demean the woman’s body and put a price on it,  rather men in the Christian view are to see their women as “flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone”; equals in a sexual relationship. Those who argue for prostitution have shown a naivety of what strengthens marriage; they have repeatedly and yet falsely argued that marriage is strengthened by unfaithfulness. They should have done rudimentary research: asked their own female partners. They have also ridiculously argued that prostitution will decrease HIV/Aids spread because of hygienic brothels. The weakness of this argument is apparent. The pro-prostitution proponents haven’t grasped why HIV spreads. Research has shown repeatedly that a lack of condom use; multiple partners and lack of abstinence have in varying degrees contributed to the spread of the HIV virus. There is no evidence that those with multiple partners will want to sleep with prostitutes, or that building brothels in Gaborone will increase condom use in the cattle posts, lands and some dark lit city corner after partying the night away. What has become clear actually is that the original national campaign of ABC (abstinence, be faithful and condomise) has been overshadowed by a gigantic C, condomise, and the message of abstinence and faithfulness has been relegated to mythology.

On the third question of moral reference, the Christian view offers God through Jesus Christ as the ultimate moral reference. Life is lived on biblical principles, not through self effort but on God’s grace. Evolution theory collapses on the moral question; it rather promotes immorality. The human body in essence is similar to that of beasts, merely at a different evolutionary level. Our ape ancestors were smarter and cunning than others, those who were meek and kind ended as dinner. Virtue has no room in the scheme of things. Philosophers offer a cocktail of answers to the question of moral reference. Existentialists such as Sartre argue for the absurd and perceive man as being in the “hurled” or “dumped” state and as the author of his own values. Ravi Zacharias says of Sartre: “As for Sartre’s ethical theory, it is one of antinomianism – lawlessness. It is a philosophy that is unliveable.” The philosopher David Hume argued that man was all matter without a soul and therefore placed moral judgement on personal feelings. His philosophy is problematic and alienating, no wonder he observes that: “I am affrighted and confounded with that forlorn solitude in which I am placed by my philosophy.”  As for Immanuel Kant, usually ranked alongside the big three – Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, he posits agnosticism. The question still stands: what is our moral reference? God, an ape or ourselves? We nail the answer to the question; we nail future choices and future moral debates.

Prostitution has no place in our society. It must be perceived for what it is: an anomaly, a social disease in desperate need of a cure. A nation that plays dice with a social ill may indeed be purchasing “its own spiritual death on an instalment plan”. The challenge of rescuing girls forced into prostitution remains. At one level its resolution will encompass resolving the Zimbabwean impasse for many prostitutes in both Gaborone and Francistown are young Zimbabwean girls squeezed out of their country because of Mugabe’s misrule. At another level we will have to take a holistic approach and tackle national issues that in part engender prostitution: amongst these being unemployment, urban migration, poverty, female abuse, and moral degeneration.

Thapelo Otlogetswe
Johannesburg, SA.

The Doctrine of Perseverance

The Doctrine of Perseverance

When the Bible Blows Your Mind

When the Bible Blows Your Mind

Eternal Security Is a Community Project

Eternal Security Is a Community Project

Eternal Security Is a Community Project

Eternal Security Is a Community Project

How to Receive the Word of Man as the Word of God

How to Receive the Word of Man as the Word of God

Perl Bigram count

#program: bigramcount - counts the number of bigrams in a text,
# prints them out in order of decreasing frequency

while(<>) {
chop;
tr/A-Z/a-z/;
tr/.,:;!?"(){}//d;
foreach $word1 (split) {
$bigram = "$word2 $word1";
$word2 = $word1;
$count{$bigram}++;
}
}

foreach $bigram (sort numerically keys %count) {
print "$count{$bigram} $bigram\n";
}

sub numerically { # compare two words numerically
$count{$b} <=> $count{$a}; # decreasing order
# $count{$b} <=> $count{$a}; # increasing order
}

Frequency counts

while(<>) {
chop;
tr/A-Z/a-z/; # convert to lower case
tr/.,:;!?"(){}//d; # strip out punctuation
foreach $word (split) { # split line into words
$count{$word}++; # count words, put count into hash (word is key, count is value)
}

}

foreach $word (sort keys %count) { # sort hash by the value of the key
print "$word $count{$word}\n"; # print out the hash in key order

}

Mahle Kwababa

One cool brother at Godfirst Church, Jo'burg. I call him the real Makhoya! 

What Every PhD student dreads

On Monday January, 16th, 2006, I received a very upsetting email from my UK PhD supervisor, Adam Kilgarriff that one Makerere University (Computer Science) student had plagiarised my PhD Research Proposal and attempted to submit it as his, both at Makerere and to my supervisor asking if my supervisor could supervise him! My supervisor forwarded this "gentleman's" email to me & I read it. I have launched a formal complaint with the Dean of Faculty of Computing and IT at Makerere University, Dr Venansius Baryamureeba. Dr Baryamureeba promised to consider may complaint "together with my colleagues and get back to you as soon as possible but not exceeding two weeks from now." I await his response.

God is ever present in dark times

New year resolutions are not my thing for life is like a flood with seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months pouring into others without any hiccups. I look back into 2005 and my experience is better characterised by oxymorons: white-darkness; bitter-sweet; melancholy-gladness & bleeding laughter. My country (yes I feel a certain ownership of Botswana, for our national anthem is right: "This land is a gift from God; An inheritance from our fore-fathers") has experienced some of the worst nightmares badly termed passion killings. "Passion killings"? It is hard to imagine any murder which occurs without a certain degree of passion: a swelling of emotions! A famous footballer (and a policeman) star killed his girlfriend; a 77 year old man killed his wife in her late 60's and her daughter in her 40's. Reasons remain a mystery. Many young men killed their "lovers" in some of the most gruesome ways ever recorded anywhere in 2005 - stuff of horror movies! Botswana was also hit by a massive drought leaving Gaborone dam 17% full (or is it 17% empty?). These were the dark, bitter, melancholic & bleeding times.

Inspite of all this, God always raises up the standard against the enemy. That is a fact! At the end of 2005, the rains came - not simple showers - but rains that flooded the land. I knew as I do now that troubles don't last always and joy comes at the break of dawn. Forever, dawn will follow the darkness of the night. Crucifiction was followed by resurrection; Peter's 3 times denial of Jesus was followed by his robust preaching and defence of the gospel; Paul's persecution of the church was subsequently followed by an apostolic work of establishing churches in Greece and many places. Hard times are never eternal - God intervenes and turns things around.

In 2005, I took a step of faith and moved from Brighton to Johannesburg where God has been working on me in different ways since. I love Brighton - but I love God more. My move was in response to his plan and purpose for my life. The church plant in Gaborone is right on God's schedule. It will not start a minute early nor a minute late. God will build his own church in Botswana - not me nor any other!

I stand in awe that God would call me his own. Grace is not only scandalous it is ridiculous: criminals evade punishment & are saved for free! 'I stand amazed when I realised your love for me is beyond all measure Lord.'