DiscussMormonism.com

I have a question wrote:

“The word ‘ponderize’ is not found in the dictionary, but it has found a place in my heart,” he said. “So what does it mean to ponderize? I like to say it’s a combination of 80 percent extended pondering and 20 percent memorization.”

Except it is found in the dictionary.

http://findwords.information/term/ponderize

Oxford English Dictionary

ponderize ˈponderize, v.Obs.rare—1
[f. L. pondus, ponder- weight + -ize.]
trans. To weigh.
1634 Sir T. Herbert Trav. 150 The sheepe are sweete, and fattest in the taile, whose weight oft ponderizes twenty pound, and many times their whole body [ed. 1665 and may well ballance the rest of the carcass]. [1656 Blount, Ponderize, to ponder, weigh, poise, or consider. (Herb. Trav.)]

http://www.oed.com/search;jsessionid=A6 ... narysearch

http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/147590?rs ... d971603030

Some Schmo wrote:He used his kids to make this site? Seems like it. It's like he pawnderized them.

moksha wrote:PONDERIZE - (verb) To profit from slogan given in General Conference. See Durrant family for a more in-depth lexicon of this attempted money-grubbing exploitation of the LDS flock.

TL;DR "Ponderize" rouses the ranty ire of a former career COB linguist, as it's virtually untranslatable in any of the 90+ languages that talk was destined for. Church leaders lack a global mindset.

This account is a new throwaway because this rant reveals too much about my identity. A lot of people will know who I am, and I don't want that connected with my other Reddit account. Also, for transparency, I didn't hear the ponderize talk, just heard ABOUT it.

Anyway, I worked full-time as a linguist for the church translation division for more than five years. It was my job to annotate and explain English source materials for church translators, including conference talks. In addition, I also translated and interpreted conference talks myself twice a year for about twelve years. It came to bother me tremendously that the supposedly-inspired men who lead the church have almost zero awareness of the audience for their discourses. They have no international mindset. It's like they're only thinking of the people in their stupid wards in Bountiful or Millcreek, and not the millions of Mormons outside of the U.S., countless numbers of whom do not even speak English at all, let alone understand Wasatch Front culture. They have this attitude like "I'll just say whatever I need to make my neighbors and friends think I'm clever and cute and spir-chal, and then let the translation division worry about making it palatable to everyone else."

This whole punny, cutesty "ponderize" crap is the perfect example of that. It takes the cake, really. You don't -- I mean you JUST DON'T -- use cutesy BS like that in a discourse that is intended for broadcast in 90+ languages. It's virtually untranslatable. I know that most people aren't linguists, this guy included, but he's a leader of a supposedly WORLDWIDE ORGANIZATION meant to dispense UNIVERSAL TRUTH to ALL HUMAN BEINGS, speaking in a WORLDWIDE CONFERENCE broadcast in 90+ LANGUAGES, and stopping to think about it for two seconds should have dissuaded him. The fact that he went ahead with it means he didn't think about it for even that long. What exactly was he expecting all of the 90+ people who translated his talk into other languages to say when they came to "ponderize"?

I mean, stuff like that happened all the time in my job, in little ways. My colleagues and I would do our best to give an alternate phrase or suggestion to help the translators cover a problematic word or phrase. If they say it once and get a chuckle and move on, a translator can paper over it without the audience noticing. But to repeat it incessantly, to make it the center of your talk, is just unforgivable and makes me almost physically cranky even now, just thinking about it. Thank Odin I don't have to translate that drivel any more, or try to write translation guides to help people shoehorn that garbage into their cultures, but I still feel for the anonymous little people behind the scenes who have to make for these men's utter lack of consideration, forethought, or global awareness. I'm still waiting for the church to become a truly "global" organization, but stuff like this, coupled with the selection of three carbon-copy lilly-white upper-class Utahns to patch up the vacancies in the twelve, just shows to me how far from being a truly global organization it really is.

</rant>