Great jokes and hilarity

Alright, time to apologize for my laziness in only posting the creations of other people, and not my own. I only enjoyed several of those to be quite honest.

So here I am, trying to think of something to say when all I really want to do is anything else.

For starters, what's the difference between βιος and ζωη? Likely nothing at all really, perhaps at one point, lost in time, there was a vast world of difference which required two different words for 'life', perhaps they are born of different dialects, I don't know.

Various sources, each less reputable than the last, offer insights of varying profundity and depth--"βιος," they say, "is physical, temporal life," or "a specific life", while "ζωη is eternal life, or life in general".

The differences seem artificial to me, applied retrospectively to the words, but again, I have no idea. We have words of our own which have this same problem, say 'soul' and 'spirit'. Souls aren't spirits, except when they are. A student of English would have a difficult time discerning the difference twixt the two, though a religious text may help, or not.

I tend to think the same applies to agape, eros, and philo, (here I grow tired of typing in greek) good examples of the frustrating futility of the average person diving to the greek of the bible for a nice esoteric insight into the mysteries of the divine, and the dangers of the foolhardy pastors who lead their flocks blindly into the murky depths of the koine (not my specialty, by any means). The blind leading the blind, as it were.

There are, of course, great things to be found in the ancient texts, but they require you to dig deep through the crust of your familiar and relatively simple native tongue first, before you can scratch the surface of an ancient language, artfully declined and deceitfully conjugated with myriad prepositions and nuances fleeting away on wings of gossamer. Mastering a tiny bit is like catching a rare butterfly in the Amazonian rainforest, a feat that is all your own, meaningless to hoi polloi, but will satisfy the hell out of you and make for fascinating discussion among collectors.

There are great philosophical and theological theories which are beautifully illustrated or even constructed entirely on ancient greek, latin, hebrew, or sanskrit words, few of which do more than use the words as algebraic symbols representing relative ideas apart from etymological history.

I don't mean that anyone and everyone is lying, or even often completely mistaken in the meanings of words, especially not in their own context, but that the great romance is removed by the unwitting, by ripping the words out of the context in which they exist, they are pulling the stars from Van Gogh's starry starry night and divorcing them from the rich tapestry in which they find meaning.

But enough of that nonsense!