Yesterday I was staring at the de-esser switch on a compressor module when this thought ran through my head: the Lord’s Prayer, now there’s a thing that could use a de-esser.
This is not the stupidest thing my brain has ever thought to itself. It’s not even close. If this blog post was about the stupidest things that every were thought by my brain it might start with this often pondered meaninglessness: is (or will be) every mathematical extrapolation of stuff that happened or will happen in my entire life divisible by three?
Also my brain knew without further clarification that I meant the Catholic version of the Lord’s Prayer as recited by the upper middle class white portion of the congregation of St. Anne’s Catholic Church in Houston, Texas; and particularly to do with the lines and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.
Is it me? I find pronunciation to reflect personality, inner desires and undisclosed beliefs. A heavy “s” like a hiss is a distinctive pronunciatorial (not a word according to WordPress inline spell checker) quality of the upper middle class not-very-productive-but-not-going-to-take-shit-from-anybody housewife. Fill a church with such machines and what you may already have thought sounded oddly creepy sounds down right sinister (go heavy on the S’s there).
Over emphasizing the S’s is actually an affront to the Lord’s Prayer – the purpose of which was to teach the congregation how to pray without making a spectacle of one’s self. It also has a strange way of making the Lord’s Prayer sound like a fashion statement.
The only thing creepier may be a congregation of nasally Mexicans singing in a Catholic Church. It sounds so colonial.
The problem you are describing is one of translation. As everyone knows, Dios habla only en Español. Well, and Latin, Greek and Aramaic, but since Latin and Aramaic are dead… and Greeks, well, he never really spoke Greek…
In Spanish, the line reads “y perdona nuestras ofensas como tambien nosotros perdonamos a los que nos ofenden.” The S’s do quite make it to that hissing sound. In latin, “dimite nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimitimus debitoribus nostris” emphasizes the D sound a lot more. Of course the original is in Aramaic: “Waschboklân chaubên wachtahên aikâna daf chnân schwoken l’chaijabên.” And who know how that sounds.