I love a good joke. Stay around me too long and you will probably hear a bad pun, a quick one liner, or some other quip. At times I have been criticized for my sense of humor, but I learned without it I might not be around. A 2005 study in the Handbook of Positive Psychology found that those who use humor to cope with stress tend to have especially healthy immune systems. It also found they are 40 percent less likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke, experience less pain during dental surgery and live four and a half years longer than average. These results shouldn’t surprise us too much. Proverbs 17:22 tells us “A joyful heart is good medicine, But a broken spirit dries up the bones.” Once again the truth of the word of God proves itself. A good laugh can be the best daily pill you can take.
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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