On Ists and Ics and everything between.

"Swimming in the same chaotic sea" - Taboga

I’m halfway through rereading Stuart Murray’s, The Naked Anabaptist. As is often the case—I suspect with most people who have spent years studying and teaching the language medium—my mind wanders into the area of words, sentences, paragraphs, grammar, connotation and denotation. Why did Murray use that word? What connotations does this sentence carry that may be unintended? Murray’s use of the English language is generally above serious criticism; he was, after all, born and raised in England where education has tended to emphasize language-arts as core . . . at least historically.

Without even having thought about it much, nearly all of us—I think—have come to know that semantically, words that end in ist are usually nouns and words that end in ic are generally adjectives (words that modify the meaning of nouns). In the sentence, “He’s a sarcastIC AnabaptIST,” the last word categorizes the person, the former adds a characteristic. (You can play a game with this: complete the sentence, “I’m a *******ic *******ist,” and see if you can zero in on the essential “YOU.” You might be, for instance, a “chronic optimist,” or an “ascerbic nihilist,” or a “spastic bigamist.”

So what does this have to do with Murray anyway? Well, Anabaptist is one of those ist words that implies that you either is one or you ain’t one. My Sixteenth Century ancestors had the name, Anabaptist, applied to them in derision: the morons who believed that child baptism was invalid and re-baptized each other as adults. If you were this kind of ist, you faced the danger of torture and execution by fire or water. If you weren’t, well, you were just subject to the ordinary sufferings of this life. Murray traces this history briefly, but takes out much of the ist part by indicating that many people have learned from this history a new way of thinking about faith and practice, so that you can actually be whatever you want, ist wise, but AnabaptistICally modified, an Anabaptistic Adventist, for instance.

But then we’d need to wrestle with the ist in Adventist.

(It’s noteworthy that the first followers of Menno Simons were called, Menists, not Mennonites.)

Ah, well. It’s something we’ve learned culturally. Maybe it makes human complexity manageable for our simple minds. You can’t really know a person—it seems—until you’ve attached a label to him or her. Never mind that the success rate of understanding one another through labels is probably closer to 0% than to 100%, but for better or worse, it’s how we operate. And the labels aren’t always ists or ics; it’s entirely possible—and common—for a brilliant, energetic film producer to turn out to have been a sleazy, prevaricating, misogynistic scuzball. But that would turn out to be just another label that leaves out more than it adds in.

For the record, I’m not Anabaptist, but I’ve grown up Anabaptistic. I’m not humanist, but I’ve become somewhat humanistic. I’m not conservatist because I’ve been nudged toward being much more . . . liberalistic, if you will. I’m not an atheist, but am agnostic when it comes to thinking through stuff using labels. I’m neither misogynistic not feministic; I waffle somewhere between those two poles. I think you get the point.

In the end, I think, we’re all personists, swimming in the same chaotic sea, hoping for an island on which to rest. True, we can be more or less of one adjective or another, but labeling is, as they say, an exercise in nailing jello to the wall.

If Murray is accurately portraying the Anabaptist contribution to peaceful, faithful living, I think the world would be a better place if we were all . . . anabaptistic personists?