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Without the English translations of the Bible hundreds of years ago, adolescents wouldn't go through puberty, we wouldn't be able to satisfy our appetites, and Keanu Reeves wouldn't have starred in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

According to Coined By God: Words and Phrases That First Appear in English Translations of the Bible (published this month by W.W. Norton), puberty, appetite and excellent are among more than 100 English words, phrases, rhythms, and idioms coined in Bible translations.

Authors Stanley Malless and Jeffrey McQuain researched the Wycliffe (1382), Tyndale (1526), Coverdale (1535), Geneva (1560), and King James (1611) translations for words or phrases that had no previous record in the English language. The terms they found—or didn't find—might surprise you. The book includes 131 brief entries that trace the items' origins and how they are now used.

Christianity Today assistant online editor Todd Hertz talked with Malless, an education professor at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, about how he and McQuain researched the book and what the Bible means for the English language.

What was the impetus for you to do this book?

This isn't really a faith-based book. The purpose was largely educational in the larger sense that it would trigger new ideas and generate interest about words and phrases.

We were coming off of our book Coined by Shakespeare. That book includes about 240 words that first appeared in Shakespeare's plays.

Our purpose in doing the Bible book was to create non-threatening vignettes to provide numerous portals into the current thinking about language study. What we were really looking for was to offer readers possible connections to the universe of multi-disciplinary stuff that's out there. Through etymologies, allusions, suggestion, and nuance, it was essentially our hope that the book would have educational, as well as entertainment, value.

Many people regard Shakespeare and the Bible to be the primary generators of English words as well as phrases, idioms, and rhythms. These two sources are the most obvious choices if looking at mechanisms for how words enter the English language. They are recognized as being the primary movers and motivators and generators of language, or English language anyway.

What was the research process for this?

We probably couldn't have done this five years ago. A lot of it was made possible because of the Internet and CD ROM technologies.

We generated the original list of words from Merriam Webster's 10th Collegiate CD, which has a function where you can check words by dates. I identified the five primary translations during the main period of translation into English—beginning with Wycliffe and ending with King James.

I used the dates for those bibles to search the Merriam Webster CD. Those particular years turned up, in some cases, hundreds of words. Some of them were off the wall, spent, and unrecognizable as English words. Some of them were very current.

From there, it was a matter of going to the original texts and getting the citations.

How was this group of words and phrases chosen for the final list?

We took our raw list and tried to find the most common, current words in the language. We wanted those that would be very recognizable or surprise people. "Oh, I didn't know liberty was coined in the Bible. Or cucumber."

This was our criteria: to choose day-to-day kinds of language. Plus, there were a number of coinages we left out because it's questionable whether the words were actually first introduced in the Bible. There weren't that many coinages that we found but left behind. There are 131 entries of both words and phrases in the book, and I doubt we found more than 200 total.

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February (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47