Ok, the title is a little lame, but I wanted to have a somewhat consistent title in what has now (unintentionally) become a series of posts on issues of context. (Previous posts: Context Involves Perspective, Context Is Everything.)

What triggered me this time? I was reading a recent post of Mark Goodacre's on the NT Gateway Weblog where he uses the adjective "wireless" in regard to internet access:

Alas, no wireless access or other internet access in the rooms so I have not been able to get my blogging machine into action.

Upon reading this, I thought, "wow, the use of the word 'wireless' sure has changed in recent years." It used to have to do solely with radio transmission. I suppose it still does, only instead of transmitting sound (radio telephony/telegraphy) now the assumed context is that of a wireless data network.

I checked m-w.com (Merriam Webster) to confirm my understanding. They have four different entries listed when one searches for wireless:

• wireless [1, adjective]
• wireless [2, noun]
• wireless telegraphy
• wireless telephone

None of these mention anything about wireless networks. So, even a prominent dictionary doesn't carry this new sense of the word. Yet I'd argue virtually everyone who read Mark's post understood immediately what he meant, especially since he added " ... or other internet access" to the sentence. This makes it unambiguous. Mark really wasn't trying to radio messages to us. He wanted a data connection so he could tell us about the cool happenings at BNTC.

This seems relevant to Biblical exegesis, at least to me. Once again, put yourself at least a few hundred years in the future and assume the requisite development/changes of language. You're reading the wisdom of that eminent (yet somewhat mysterious) sage, Mark Goodacre. His writings are normally clear, but in your frenzied research you stumble onto this somewhat strange fragmentary witness. Lacunae are marked by brackets:

Alas, no wireless access or other [...]
access in the rooms so I have not [...]
able to get my blogging machine [...]

Now you can make all sorts of crazy reconstructions. If you've got copy of the Merriam Webster Dictionary from the late 20th century, you'd only know 'wireless' as having to do with radio stuff. I can't consult the OED, so I don't know what it would have. It would be better to check in this case, but I'd guess the primary definition(s) there also would have to do with radio telegraphy. If you look later in the fragment and see "machine", you may jump and make the conclusion that he must be referencing radio telegraphy since he's talking about "machines" and therefore mechanical devices of some sort (It's all in the same semantic domain, you see). But you'd still be wrong. If you interpret the language in light of early 20th century terminology, you'll get the wrong idea (perhaps even without lacunae).

Once you start to understand Goodacre the wise (I'm not going to argue for a proto-Goodacre in this post, and don't get me started on the Goodacre-ian redactors ... ) you learn that as one of the high priests of the biblioblog cult, he practiced something called "blogging", which was done on "computer" (also known as a "machine") and disseminated this "blogging" on the "internet". And that, way back then, these "computers" had wired and "wireless" connections to the "internet" via local wired and wireless networks. So "wireless" in the above fragment has nothing to do with radio telegraphy, it has to do with transmission of data packets across the air. So, you might conclude, the above quote had to do with expressing that at some point, he was unable to practice this ascetic discipline of blogging to broadcast instructions to his followers.

Or something like that.