Posted on 04/25/2006 3:08:53 PM PDT by sionnsar
I found this Hip Hop prayer book while looking up 1940 Hymnals on the Church Publishing website. Look's pretty goofy to me. Here is how it translates Psalm 23:
Psalm 23 as adapted by Ryan Kearse
The Lord is all that, I need for nothing.
He allows me to chill.
He keeps me from being heated
and allows me to breathe easy.
He guides my life so that
I can represent and give
shouts out in his Name.
And even though I walk through
the Hood of death,
I don't back down
for you have my back.
The fact that you have me covered
allows me to chill.
He provides me with back-up
in front of my player-haters
and I know that I am a baller
and life will be phat.
I fall back in the Lord's crib
for the rest of my life.
Traditional Anglican ping, continued in memory of its founder Arlin Adams. I see that English teacher's must be getting along well; there is apparently no requirement for them to even show up for work. Who needs to teach proper 'English'; as long as we kin unner-stan each udder.
Hmmm. The goofiness of the whole thing notwithstanding (I'm sure I am just too old) I found a surprising proper use of the language here that suggests this might have been written either by a non-rapper, or a literate one.
"...give shouts out in his Name." Ordinarily, that kind of thing would be mistakenly pluralized as "shout outs". However, like "brothers in law" the writer has correctly pluralized the term. "Shout outs," though improper, would sound more ebonic, so I am guessing our author is a hip-hop wannabee.
Maybe they had a good English teacher who was on the job. :-)
On the other hand, you might want to rethink the apostrophe in teacher's. :-)
Ouch ... guilty as charged ;-P
Not to worry. My usual approach to apostrophes and commas is kind of superstitious. After wrtiting I turn around backwards and toss a few into the text like salt over my shoulder. Occasionally one lands in the right place.
Well...er, what's the dif? I don't really have a problem with the street slang version. It gets the point across and perhaps will help those who slangspeak better understand the meaning of the 23rd Psalm. After all, I can't read the ancient languages of the Bible in which the orginal lines were first written, so I appreciate the English translation.
English Teacher's? I guess your teacher didn't show up for work either. It's just plain old TEACHERS - PLURAL. No apostrophe. Do you unner-stan?
I ripped on the ENGLISH PROFESSOR about his apostrophe usage, but I just noticed that had already been done. The funny thing is that he went on to defend his poor knowledge of English. It wasn't a typo on his part. The bottom line is, how can anyone be against ideas that might help to bring God into the lives of more people? Some might find it goofy, but there are two lost generations of inner city kids out there and this ministry is trying to reach out to them and show them somebody - and God - cares about them. Is this such a bad thing?
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