I’m editing some Puritan prayers for a new Lexham Press project, and I’m really enjoying the edification provided by these wonderfully eloquent, godly Christians of yore. But I am most certainly keeping my thinking cap on as I read (that’s my job), because the project includes a slight modernization—which basically means a translation from one form of English to another, an overlapping one. The key concept of Authorized: The Use and Misuse of the King James Bible, “false friends,” has come in handy multiple times.
A “false friend,” as I define the term, needs to meet two of three criteria: it’s a word (or piece of syntax or punctuation, etc.) that is 1) still used today but 2) could or did mean something different in 1611, and 3) that has “changed in such a way that modern readers are unlikely to notice” (119). That last point is a little fuzzy, because modern readers differ. Some are more perceptive than others. Some are more experienced with the words and patterns of Elizabethan English than others. I don’t know how many people, or what people, a given “false friend” has to trip up before it counts as a full false friend. It’s a judgment call every time. I still want to call a word a false friend if I notice it but don’t know what the author meant by it; if I only know our modern use of the word and not his Early Modern use of the word.
I wonder, can you spot the false friends in the following prayer from Puritan luminary Joseph Alleine? I’ll update later with the answer(s).
O my Lord, bring me where you feed, let me live in your face, let me feel your smiles upon my heart, let me love you, tell me you love me. Remember, accept, pity, and take care of me, and then choose my condition, my dwelling, and entertainment for me.
Update with answers (12/27/2018):
It’s not always easy or possible to figure out false friends, particularly when they are phrases and not words.
• I think “where you feed” is probably a pastoral metaphor: bring me where you feed the sheep such as myself. If it’s a true false friend, I couldn’t establish this with the OED. But I do think the word strikes modern English speakers as talking about where God feeds himself. It’s certainly awkward in a way it probably (apparently?) wasn’t in Joseph Alleine’s day.
• “In your face” I’m not certain about either, and the OED isn’t helping me. But I think it means “before your presence.” In today’s English it does sound oppositional, I think.
• The OED did help me substantially with “entertaintment.” It gives this sense, which fits perfectly: “Provision for the material or financial needs of a person, animal, place, etc.; maintenance, support; sustenance. Obsolete.”