by Seattle Jon (bio)
Another installment from Saintspeak, the mormon humor dictionary from Orson Scott Card. Previous installments can be found here. Reproduced with permission from Signature Books.
Magnify Your Calling To do what needs to be done without waiting to be commanded. Not to be confused with going off half-cocked. You can easily tell the difference: if it worked, you magnified your calling; if it didn't you went off half-cocked.Mahonri Moriancumr If that were your name, you'd go by "the brother of Jared," too.
Many Are Called, But Few Are Chosen The words Mormons use to console themselves when they are stuck with cleaning up after the quorum party alone, even though six other people promised to help.
Millenium A thousand years of genealogy, temple work, proselytizing, and filling out reports, a prospect that can make wickedness and destruction look downright enticing.
Missionary A saint who has put on the whole armor of God, even though it's heavy, out of style, and 3 sizes too big.
Missionspeak A pidgin English built around the root word 'flip' and employing snatches of dozens of other languages. While the origins of words in Missionspeak are easy to trace, long conversations remain untranslatable even by the most accomplished linguists. Missionspeak seems to be a whole new turn in the history of language: an idiom that is used to convey raw emotion without communicating anything that could be called "meaning."
