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Something has been bothering me for 37 years.
This week, I finally did something about it.
In 1989, the McDonalds ventured to a local theater to see Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, lighthearted family fare about a scientist/inventor (played by Rick Moranis) whose quirky “shrinking machine” accidentally reduces his two children and a couple of neighbor kids to just a quarter inch in height.
When the children fail to alert Moranis to their plight, he mindlessly throws them out with the trash. Now they must escape the trash bag and make their way back to the house across an overgrown yard that is teeming with natural and manmade obstacles.
The outrageous plot points have never bothered me. That’s part of the fun.
But the title is a different story.
The movie should have been called Honey, I Shrank the Kids. The grammar is straightforward. The options for the verb are present, past, or past perfect tense: “I shrink,” “I shrank,” or “I have shrunk the kids.” Rick Moranis is reporting a simple past event. Option 2, therefore, is the correct one.
If he had been talking about breakfast, he would surely have said, “Honey, I drank the orange juice,” not, “I drunk the Minute Maid.”
Something makes me think I should have let this go 37 years ago.
A few days ago, when I heard a national news reporter say, “The boat sunk” (instead of “The boat sank”) I decided it was high time to see what the Internet had to say. I found a couple of articles that acknowledged that while “shrink, shrank, shrunk” is technically the proper sequence of tenses, “shrunk” is occasionally acceptable these days, in common parlance, as a substitute for “shrank.”
I believe I can finally watch the movie again in peace.
No one disputes that words and the meaning of words can be subject to change from generation to generation.
Consider the dedication of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the second largest church building in the world, which has dominated the London skyline for more than three centuries.
When it opened in 1708, King George I let its architect, Christopher Wren, know exactly what he thought about it.
It was awful, the king said. And artificial.
If you’re picturing Wren feeling devasted by those remarks, think again. He was thrilled. When the king said the new cathedral was “awful,” he meant “awe-full.” It inspired a sense of awe. And in the 18th century the English word “artificial” meant “full of great art.”
Those were career-transforming compliments.
It’s one thing to hang on to the words of those who are evaluating our most recent projects. It’s quite another thing to entrust our lives to the words of Someone whose communication is now 20 centuries old.
Has the meaning of God’s Word gradually gotten lost in translation?
It’s the job of professional scholars, theologians, and philologists to make sure we know, as best we can, what Jeremiah, Malachi, Luke, and Peter meant by the words they wrote so long ago.
It’s God’s job, through his Holy Spirit, to make sure those same words grip our hearts on a daily basis.
The prophet Isaiah wrote what all of us can learn from personal experience: “The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever” (Isaiah 40:8).
Seasons come and go. Everything around us changes.
But the assurances we find in God’s Word – his bedrock promises of mercy, grace, and life-changing power – will never shrink, shrank, or shrunk.
You have to admit:
That’s a perfectly awful thing to hear.