Will recent dress-code changes affect the WTS negatively?

by Wonderment 32 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  slimboyfat

  What does its etymology matter? It means nothing to a British person. I’d literally never heard the word before. Maybe that’s just me? I guessed what it was from the context but did a google search to make sure.

  Watchtower have highlighted once again that while they can translate their message into a thousand obscure languages, including creoles, for some reason accommodating British English is either not worth the bother or is beyond them.

  Another nontrivial example is the fact that “college” was denounced for English speaking JWs on both sides of the Atlantic despite the term having a somewhat different meaning in the UK compared with the US. Little effort was made from the Watchtower, local elders were left to make sense and mop up the confusion locally.
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  careful

  The coded meaning of "conscience matter" is "we are now permitting you to do what we previously forbade."

  SBF: whether the org writers fully know it or not, "college" in American English has a wide semantic domain. One meaning = university. Another meaning, a unit within a university (e.g., the College of Medicine, the College of Fine Arts, the College of Arts and Sciences). Another meaning, an institution of higher education that is lower than a university. An example of the last is a community college. But for that first meaning: one of the Ivy League schools is Dartmouth College, a prestigious institution, a highly ranked place to go within higher education, certainly more than on par with many American universities. Ditto with long-respected liberal arts colleges such as Williams College in Mass. or Carleton College in Minn. Then there is the most respected institution of higher education in Reform Judaism (Progressive Judaism in the UK), Hebrew Union College. It's just a graduate school (post-grad in the UK). They only offer graduate degrees. One has to already have a bachelor's degree to apply there. It's still called a college, but academically, like Dartmouth, Williams, Carleton, and others, it's way up there.

  I suspect that the semantic domain of this word is greater in the USA than in the UK.
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  slimboyfat

  I am aware of the range of meanings of the word “college”.
  
  The point is that in the UK “going to college” most often implies precisely not going to university but doing a short course at a small institution instead. (“Johnny didn’t make it into university, he’s doing a college course instead.”) So when Watchtower told young British JWs not to go college but that they could do short vocational training instead it sounded like they were saying they should eat apples but not eat fruit. The Watchtower made no effort to acknowledge the confusion this terminology could cause British JWs.