EDITOR: If you are in any way interested in religion, you are virtually a unique person in our society today. If you are reading the Bible regularly, proving its veracity to yourself, that it means what it says, that its message is consistent from Genesis to Revelation, and if you are trying to obey it to the best of your ability, you are really a most exceptional, or unusual, person.
Webster’s New World Dictionary, Second College Edition, has this among its meanings for hypocrisy: ‘a pretense to virtue’ and ‘a pretending to be what one is not…’ Either serves well in identifying the essences of one crop after another of Guyanese politicians. The current head of the Guyana chapter of a reputable watchdog group with international footprints took it up several notches in the article titled “Politicians are experts at hypocrisy -Transparency Guyana President” (KN April 9). Now, we take it still higher: many Guyanese politicians are world class hypocrites, in a class of their own, and the higher they go up the political power ladder, the more blatant their hypocrisies.
Everyone knows what the word “kike” means, but not everyone agrees on where the word comes from. That mystery is back in the headlines with yet another viral use of the slur this time, it was NBA player Meyers Leonard who unleashed the word during a heated gaming moment.
“Dictionaries prefer to say that its origin is unknown, which is right but uninspiring,” Anatoly Liberman wrote on the Oxford English Dictionary blog in 2009, as part of a series he did on ethnic slurs.
And to make matters more complex, the OED was unable to officially identify any uses of “kike” before 1904. That means we move to the world of theories.