Unsound rabbinical claims on the meanings of words
Jewish
Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards
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Second Thought podcast script
Welcome to the Second Thought podcast. Where we train the crosshairs of reason on the presenters of TftD. Today’s Second Thought is on what was broadcast on TftD by Rabbi Daniel Greenberg on 22 May 2025.
Somewhat unusually, this is not a drawn-out complaint about a lack of accuracy in what was claimed by the presenter, or about a lack of logical coherence. There is no complaint that the broadcast was platitudinous guff like those we’ve seen from Ibrahim Mogra. It wasn’t a thought vacuum like one notable example from Martin Wroe, it didn’t contain deceptive rhetoric like those from Jennifer Smith. It was not a great example, but it wasn’t bad.
Daniel made a very lame gesture at topicality and it most certainly was not a reflection on a person or event in the news. topicality nod was no more than the rhythm of the Jewish year as reflected in topics of teaching. It was a reflection on property law from a Jewish perspective. One that has resonance with the temporary stewardship we have of this planet, particularly given how bad we appear to be at it.
Daniel opened his TftD with these words.
GREENBERG: There is no word for “mine” in the Hebrew language. For any Hebrew speakers now shouting “sheli” at the radio, the late Rabbi Morris Swift (a leading UK orthodox Rabbinic judge of the last century, noted for powerful and idiosyncratic sermons) used to respond to similar cries of “sheli” from around the synagogue by explaining that it is a conflation of two words: “yesh” meaning there is, and “li” meaning to me. This etymological construct reminds us that the Jewish concept of property is that God assigns property to my use and control from time to time, but it remains God’s in all real senses.
The main problem, and it’s pretty trivial compared to a lot of the ridiculous crap that the BBC allows TftD to broadcast. That problem was with the linguistic position that Daniel introduced with Morris Swift.
First, what Swift described is not a conflation, but that goes straight to the heart of the periphery.
The real problem is that what Rabbi Swift claims about sheli is almost certainly not true. He says that Hebrew does not have a word for ‘mine’. Convenient for teaching (poetic even) but none the less, not true.
There are hundreds of apparent rules about grammar and usage of language. At least, I’m guessing there are; I have to extrapolate exclusively from English but can’t imagine the same isn’t true outside the anglophone world. Over the last 40 years I’ve been frowned at by teachers, contemporaries and books for many an apparent breach of these rules. For example, For splitting an infinitive. For not splitting an infinitive. For treating the word none as though, grammatically, it is singular. For using theirs instead of his or hers. And, a little more recently, for using his or hers instead of theirs.
Each of these was presented to me as though I’d committed a grave error. One of them was an error, at least, it was by the logic into which I’m about to delve.
Thirty years ago, I became interested in knowing why so much of the way we routinely speak and write was considered wrong. That inspired the purchase of my first copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Fowlers’, I should point out, was about as close as there was to a definitive set of rules for using English, especially in formal writing. With a copy of Fowlers’ in hand, I took to it all rather too well. For at least a decade I was a card-carrying member of the grammar gestapo. Which was a problem.
It gradually became apparent to me that I’d somewhere taken a wrong step. The grammar police seemed much less motivated by clarity of communication than they were by virtue signalling (of their elitist knowledge) and demonstrating support of a collection of ideas that were not easy to justify. There was also a habit among those usage wardens of being selective with the guidance they were willing to follow, especially when it changed or demoted a ‘rule’ they had enjoyed following for several decades. There was consequently a righteousness to many defenders of correct English usage.
My experience has been that righteous behaviour tends to reveal a triumph of certainty over curiosity. Realising that I’d become victim to the same triumph was humbling, and also a little embarrassing.
By way of illustration, usage guardians of yore would preach that because the word none was a contraction of the phrase ‘not one’, then we should treat none as though it were singular and not plural. Hence, because it was correct to say that not one of these is green, we should also say that none of these is green, instead of none of these are green.
If you hear someone say, today, that none of these is green, they are almost certainly in the business of signalling, to anyone who knows and cares, that they are knowledgeable of this old rule. Oddly, they are also signalling their ignorance or perhaps that they are stubbornly a creature of habit. It turns out that none is not a contraction of ‘not one’, it’s derived from an old English word, naan which was a compound of words that meant not and one, but that had been used as a word, and as both singular and pleural for as long as it was in common usage. There was no sound argument, and there had never been a sound argument for none, in English to be regarded always as singular.
The same happens with split infinitives. To boldly go is the most famous split infinitive. Yet, you’ll hear an ever-decreasing population of die hards who (outside the context of Star Trek) will say, something like ‘boldly to go’ instead. These folk too, are no longer in the business of effective communication of meaning but instead are in the business of selective communication of elitest virtue. They too are wrong, both by the yardsticks of usage and language. Not splitting infinites was a 19th century invention based upon an analogy with Latin. It’s no more logical than saying all instances of the letter c in English should be pronounced the way Ks are pronounced because that’s how they were pronounced in Latin. Bewilderingly stupid, the rule, not the people. Many were taught this was correct by teachers who thought it was correct. None of them were (or was) stupid for doing the teaching or the learning.
Most English usage guidance in the 1990s was prescriptive. This included much of the 1996 copy of Fowlers’ that I’d purchased. And it included pretty much every similar guide published at that point for all history.
The authors and editors of these books took a line on what they believed to be correct, and the English that the believed people ought to use. Correct English was prescribed by a knowledgeable elite, and very little account was taken by the sources of this guidance on how English was actually used, or that this usage was causing the language to change.
By the time of Fowler’s 1996 edition, a descriptive approach had started eroding the traditional prescriptive model. By about 2010, a descriptive approach to how English should be used had taken over. Description overtook prescription. Curiosity finally overtook dogma. Science overtook judgement. How we speak, overtook how that grammar gestapo thought we should speak.
Usage and meaning were finally accepted as being in constant flux. Someone jamming a dictionary into the cycle of change claiming that a usage has deviated from a preferred definition is now mostly an illustration that someone missed a meeting.
I’m no student of Hebrew but linguistics appears to operate by a fairly consistent set of rules. Languages change. Words change. The spelling and the meaning. New words are coined. Old words fall into the shadows of the larger dictionaries.
It’s now clear from history and linguistics that a word has the meaning we give to it with use. Not the meaning that it once had, or the meanings associated with its etymology.
I recall reading a book by the wonderful writer Bill Bryson in the 90s. It set out a concise and accessible guide to English usage. In fact, he wrote two, Troublesome Words and Mother Tongue. Both noble efforts, I enjoyed reading them very much. Many people, just like me, wanted to be right. If, like him, you worked in busy newsroom, being right really mattered, well consistency mattered. All the writers and editors would want there to be uniformity of usage and style across all the articles of the newspaper. Newspapers inevitably have style guides, and most nominate an authority to which deference should be shown in the event of doubt. Almost all style guides reinforce many prescriptive elements of English usage. Under the banner of consistent high quality, this is sensible but should not be allowed to conflate with general guidance on usage.
Bill Bryson was simply sharing the benefits of his journalistic experience. Books like Bryson’s (along with many similar examples) were useful at the time for anyone wanting to know what was considered correct by an experienced print journalist. Reading them now, though, is like watching an episodeof QI, where a collection of earnestly held myths, misnomers and untruths are blasted apart by modernity, careful research and raucous laughter.
The example that springs to mind is ‘decimate’. Bill, along with many other ‘careful professional’ users of English prescribed that decimate should only be used to denote a reduction by a tenth.
Readers were warned by Bryson against using decimate in its modern sense of to ‘obliterate’, being told that its meaning is imposed by the Latin (yep, bloody Latin, wading in again) and that Latin meant to reduce by a tenth, and was apparently a Roman military punishment. A military leader needing to send a very serious message to his troops would group his unfortunate men in tens, who would then draw lots. And in each group, Nine would then be ordered to kill the loser. In the same way that first-world-war deserters might be killed by firing squad. Literary sources suggest that this did occur, well at least once, possibly. A commander called Marcus Licnius Crassus was reported with a degree of consistency across multiple sources to have used decimation during the Spartan revolt to restore discipline. After that, the threat of decimation was probably sufficient.
While it may once have happened, the claimed implications of Latin origins for the modern meaning of the word decimate are hogwash.
The word decimate means what we use it to mean. It means ‘obliterate’ or ‘devastate’. Even lofty former broadsheet journalists like Bill Bryson won’t be found using the word to mean reduce by one tenth. For a start, no one would know what he meant, defeating the very purpose of writing it. It seems likely that decimate has not been used (without agenda) outside of academia to mean ‘reduce by a tenth’ for well over 200 years.
When the word entered English via French, it already meant to punish one tenth, not kill one tenth. The capital element of punishment had already slipped.
The numerical element then, in the 1600s began to fade. By the eighteenth century, outside of Roman history club, the word was routinely used to mean, ‘destroy a large part of’ or to ‘devastate’.
There were, or course, holdouts. Those who objected to this imprecise use. Preserving nuance was considered important. What, though, did they think they were losing? It’s almost never useful to describe a punishment by death of one in ten. The word was effectively given new life by a change in usage with a new, much more useful, meaning.
It wasn’t that the precision of the word was lost. The need for the original meaning was lost, opening the way for what linguists apparently call a semantic broadening.
As noted earlier, words change.
Which is why dictionaries are revised so often. Most major dictionaries make a PR opportunity from annual announcements of top new words and significant (and usually modestly controversial) changes in meanings of existing words. And literally, I’m looking at you.
Lexicographers, the compliers of dictionaries, build windows to the past, well aware they cannot provide authority on what is current. Dictionary readers, though, behave as though they have purchased an enduring truth comparable to the words of gods. I suspect all of us have at some point consulted a 20-year-old dictionary and relayed what we found there as absolute authority.
Before the turn of the millenium, the writers and the readers of usage guides took refuge in the same belief of authority.
Which brings us back to the powerful and idiosyncratic sermons of the late Rabbi Morris Swift. Well, at least to Swift’s insistence that there is no Hebrew word for “mine”. And his insistence on dismissing the word “sheli”, explaining that it is merely a compound of two words: “yesh” meaning there is, and “li” meaning to me.
Hebrew, I’m sure, has its linguistic quirks but on the face of it, by Swift’s logic, there is no English word for football, or everything, or microscope, or today, or greenhouse, or outcome, or telephone, or insight.
Which is clearly nonsense, or poppycock, or codswallop.
If etymology matters for meaning, then we’re in a world of trouble. Artificial once meant skilfully made. Nice meant ignorant. Decimate meant punish and set a grisly example by randomly killing 10% of the army.
Hebrew obviously has a word for mine, regardless of its etymology. And apparently, that word is sheli.
The unusual and dynamic behaviour of languages is described beautifully in two excellent books I find myself recommending to people almost as much as Hans Rosling’s Factfulness. Don’t Believe A Word, by David Shariatmadari, and Words on the Move by John McWhorter. Two quite extraordinary people, who distilled their expertise into entertaining and illuminating reading. McWhorter devoted an initial chapter to historical examples of what is currently happening in English to the word ‘literally’.
By way of warning, the full title of John McWhorter’s book is:
Words on the Move: Why English Won’t – and Can’t – Sit Still (Like, Literally)
Very, for example, is from verily and once meant genuinely. It is now used quite differently, having lost the meaning of its origin. The word really is on a similar path.
Despite it feeling like a very modern phenomenon, the same has been happening to literally for decades.
The explanation is rooted in a bit of linguistics that describes how these words become modal pragmatic markers – which is comically opaque language for something that reveals quite a lot about our language, how personal we make it and how we use many words to convey attitude, emphasis, relationship and to manage discourse. Well, So, Y’know, Really, Very, Like, and Literally are essential parts of speech in this regard but they are alien to the word types (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and the rest) that we teach in schools. Anyone objecting to beginning a sentence with the word ‘Well’, should probably update their usage library.
And as luck might have it, in 2015, a heavily revised version of Fowlers’ Modern English Usage was published. It very much signalled that the tide had turned. Fowlers’ 2015 is a work of guidance founded on evidence of how we use our language, not on the opinions of how someone thinks we should use it.
It’s vastly easier to read than its predecessor and it plants Fowlers’ as a solid advocate of the consequences for usage of the dynamic nature of language.
If there’s a member of the gestapo in your life who tuts at split infinitives, or when you say different to, instead of different from, or if you were end a sentence on a preposition, please be emboldened by the relegation of all these by Fowlers’ from prescriptive rules to matters of style and preference.
This has not been an example of TftD broadcasting intolerable flaws or fact or logic. The linguistic error I claim Swift made is not being made by Daniel. Daniel does a fine job of presenting a reflection from a religious perspective. The teaching path from sheli to stewardship vs ownership is clearly effective and well-trodden. I have no doubt that Swift landed the lessons of his sermon using his etymological construct, with power and precision, regardless of linguistics and idiosyncrasy.
Greenberg is, though, guilty of a little exaggeration. He says:
GREENBERG: Through land law, credit law and employment law this week’s Torah portion focuses the Jewish concept of property on responsibility and not on possession. I am a guardian of any property that is “sheli” – allocated to me from time to time – and I must nurture it and share it in that spirit. This was a radical message in Biblical times in many societies where might was right and possession was ten tenths of the law:
The suggestion that this was radical is a case of overstatement.
Several centuries before the Torah, the Babylonian king Hammurabi was responsible for an extensive code of civil law. Known today as the Hammurabi Code, it regulated property, tenancy and debt to protect the vulnerable. Proclamations of debt release were a feature of several Mesopotamian kingdoms that preceded the emergence of Judaism. These cancellations were, though, discretionary and political, not theological and systematic as under Judaic law. Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian rulers would proclaim debt cancellations as a means to maintain social stability, and the ability to raise an effective militia to wage wars. To suggest, though, that early Jews were an oasis of civilisation in a world of barbarism and warlords is fanciful. Trade was vital for the success of societies in the region in these times and effective trade required rules, contracts, courts and justice. Might is right was not the prevailing system governing property. Not even close.
The theological integration of debt and property law was also nothing new. King Hammurabi’s authority was considered to be a divine gift. The explicit claim that all land belonged to god was, though, something of a rare feature of the Torah, perhaps even a unique feature.
In any event, I remain grateful to Greenberg for an opportunity to explore the fluid nature of language and the endlessly evolving meanings of words.
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