Orthodox Rocks - Part I

Before your very eyes, I'm going to build a post in three installments dealing with the roots and meaning of "orthodox".  This is Part I, of course.

At the same time we moved into our current home a new Greek Orthodox church was being built nearby.  While the rest of the family was looking forward to the baklava at the annual Greek food fest, I had my eye on more substantive fare.  Being a devout believer in the supremacy of Kansas City Barbeque, I devoted myself to building a mammoth backyard smoker.  I habitually scouted for construction areas where large flat slabs of Kansas limestone were exposed.  The good Greeks had unearthed a truckload for me a half mile from my house.  A hernia and a knee replacement later, I have myself a killer smoker in which I can smoke a drawn and quartered pig or 120 racks of ribs, more or less.

Now that I have established this scintillating prologue to my blog trilogy, I should prolly get to work.  Orthodox, ortho + dox.  Let's focus on the dox part today.  Our IE root is dek1 with the meaning of "to take or accept".  A direct descendant is decent - something that is acceptable.  How do we learn what is decent or acceptable?  Well, experience is a great teacher, but history is full of the value of teachers who instruct what is acceptable across the wide range of human endeavor.  The Latin word docere means to show or instruct (to teach) and it is the headwater of all our doc- words like doctor, orginally a religious term meaning scholarly teacher.  Over time, doctor became applied to anyone having earned the highest college degree.  A doctor then teaches doctrines or dogma and points out paradoxes to his disciples (those who are learning what is acceptable through discipline).  (The use of the term doctor to refer to a medical profession is really just the tip of the iceberg.)

As noble a word as doctor is, isn't it interesting that when you alter or change something with an attempt to deceive, it is said that you "doctor" it.  That's not acceptable at all!

Next post: we'll tackle the ortho side of the equation.

While not quite a googlewhack, "orthodox rocks" only gets 160 hits on a Google search.