"Revelations"

[Thom Harrison]

Something that may or may not be relevant:  In the part of the US where I
grew up and still live (the Southeast), people add -s fairly
indiscriminately, particularly to the names of retail stores.  I had always
interpreted this as a superfluous possessive.  Sears already has an -s, but
people add it to Belk's, and now K-Mart's, Wal-Mart's, and Kroger's, as it
"I'm going to Wal-Mart's.  You need anything?"

And I thought that there might be a spillover effect in "Revelations,"
perhaps reinforcing the observations already made on this list.

Thom


-----Original Message-----
From: Mark A Mandel [mailto:mam at THEWORLD.COM]
Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 5:44 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: "Revelations"


On Wed, 20 Mar 2002, A. Maberry wrote:

#That still leaves the question of why "Revelations", however ...

I would guess, from the formula "The Book of ...".

In the Book headings of the AV as I have it here, and as I've often
heard/seen in formal use, the books of the NT have names like "The
Gospel According to <name>", or "The [<nth>] Epistle of <name> [to the
<inhabitants of place>]". The books of the OT are here titled "The <nth>
Book of Moses, called <name of book>", but in the formal style "The Book
of <name of book>", with "The Song of Songs" and "The Proverbs" as the
only exceptions AFAIK. (I'm too lazy to inspect all those pages, and the
TOC uses the short names.)

Except for Proverbs, AFAIK Revelation is the only book whose short name
is the head of the long form rather than part of the PP: "The Revelation
of St. John the Divine". It's not a Gospel or an Epistle, so (I
hypothesize) people trying to use the full form of the name in formal
style assume that it must be a Book, using the default common noun in
the basic metaformula "The <noun> <preposition> <distinctive name>".

Given that assumption, "The Book of Revelation" is much less likely than
"The Book of Revelations", almost ungrammatical. And in the short form,
the word "revelation" with no article *is* ungrammatical, as
"revelations" is not.

-- Mark A. Mandel