P.S. I’m also currently trying to put together a bibliography of Mormon linguistics research and projects, which I should probably write a post about sometime soon.

Oh, and I have to urge caution in copying the Urban Dictionary too closely. It’s so open to definitions that, really, it’s pretty worthless. I think you being overlord will make the project more healthy than trusting the Internet too completely.

Kent:

1. Of course not, I have a problem with facetiousness. Or so my mother always told me.

2. You bet!

4. I don’t think it will be missed. Although trying to imagine what “missionary couple” might have said could well be worse than what was actually there….

1. You mean if it worked to avoid conflict of interest? No, but Wikipedia isn’t all that good at avoiding conflict of interest, IMO. As soon as you knew that you would hava post here, there was a conflict of interest.

But, no matter, I think you managed to pull off a fairly even article, and I’m very glad that the article is there.

2. Great, I’ll try to remember to email you in december. Please also remember if I forget, OK? [GRIN]

and 4. I’ve deleted it. Its another like the one that Ardis found. Just re-read what I wrote in comment #4 for an explanation.

The impact is starker when you start translating terms into other languages. For example, its fairly easy to translate Molly Mormon and Peter Priesthood into Spanish or Portuguese (in Portuguese, I’d use Maria Mormon and Simão Sacerdócio). But the underlying concept doesn’t really exist among Mormons there, as far as I can tell.

Obviously, allowing for definitions that represent different perspectives provides a place for handling issues like this (after all, each different language is also a different perspective, isn’t it?)

Of course, the trick is a technical question. How? How do you list these different perspectives? [I'll have to look at the urban dictionary to see how they handle it.]

Obviously, Mormon Terms could really use this kind of input and help.

1. I hurried and wrote that entry before I was published here so there would be no conflict of interest. I wonder if it worked….

2. I have a friend (a specialist in Middle English) who is writing a Mormonominary. She’s currently taking a break from her PhD program to serve a missionary in Sweden, but her project is similar to yours. It is nowhere near as large in scope, but she traces the history of terms ala the OED with examples and citations and so forth. If you’re interested, email me in December when she comes home and I’ll hook you up with her. I know she’ll be interested in your project and there might be a nice symbiosis to be had.

3. Being a word guy myself, I’ve found that losing a correct but little-used word like “God” can catch the attention of otherwise passive listeners. Switching (broadening) vocabulary can be a useful tool in communication.

4. This one cracked me up:

First Ministry of Jesus Christ:* Jesus having taken a physical body, and come to earth to establish the kingdom of God, was apparently incompetent and lacking in inspiration, for He made numerous mistakes and ultimately failed to impact humanity and complete His Mission – in fact creating such a mess with that Great Abominable Church, it seems like we would have all been better off had Jesus just stayed home and really gotten serious about carpentry. As it turns out, Peter was not the Rock upon He would build his church, but rather Peter was to return like Ben Kenobi bestow upon Luke Skywalker the Jedi Priesthood. In fact it seems Jesus was set up by His Father In Heaven for complete failure, just so that Joseph Smith could come down here and clean up all that mess Jesus had started… Leave it to Jesus, right?

Thank you, theologist!

Unfortunately, the anti-Mormon lists generally included many more relevant terms than the lists put together by active members. Clearly, the anti-Mormons put a lot more effort into their lists for some reason.

Eventually, the list of potential terms will go away as we manage to get most terms defined.