A 22-year-old man was arrested in Kitsap, Wash., after tossing a barrage of rocks at people, leading some to chase him until police intervened. The man explained that he is preparing to enter an Ultimate Fighting Championship contest but had never actually been in a fight and wanted experience at getting beaten up. Judging by his action he should have just asked, I'm sure plenty of people would have obliged. His conduct why rather absurd, isn’t that uncommon. Many people, even when they know certain sinful behavior is dangerous and wrong, are tempted to try it for “experience sake.” Satan often used the “it won’t hurt to try it once” motto to pull many people into web of destruction. Remember the Proverbs 7:23 say about sins seduction, “As a bird hastens to the snare, So he does not know that it will cost him his life.”
Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...
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