I spent a lot of the day today doing work, copy editing for a number of different people mostly. While I could go on about why that made me late for getting this post out into the world, that would be boring.
Plus anyone reading this after tonight probably wouldn’t care in the first place. So I’m just going to not do that.
Instead I’m going to pull out an interesting tidbit from one of my jobs today and expand on it.
See, while doing a copy edit for a story coming out of Boom sometime soon regarding the current discussions about separating immigrant children from their parents at the border (a topic I don’t plan to delve too deeply into here, don’t worry) I found there were a few words I had to look up to see if they were being used correctly.
One such word stood out in particular because it gave me a more proper term to use for something which otherwise I’ve always treated in a casual manner.
Proselytize
Intransitive Verb form
- To induce someone to convert to one’s faith.
- To recruit someone to join one’s party, institution, or cause.
Transitive Verb form
- To recruit or convert especially to a new faith, institution or cause.
via the Merriam-Webster dictionary
Basically, when the Jehovah’s Witnesses come to your house to talk with you about their faith, they are proselytizing.
The term extends further than just religious door-to-door salesmanship, however. It’s also a politician’s term, a social movement’s term, an industrialist’s term, so on and so forth.
Funny enough, the word actually reminded me of a story I wrote back in 2013 for the High Tide. Julian Stern, a kid who I’d known through being a school acquaintance for some time by then, was running for City Council while just 18 years old.
Very specifically I recall him spending some time in my house to do the interview because he happened to be going door-to-door campaigning in my neighborhood at the time. It was an interesting interview to be sure, and I actually wound up reflecting that in the lede to my article.
You can read the article here, by the way. Bottom right-hand corner of page three.
Looking back on it now I probably would have been laughed out of my high school newsroom for trying to use a term like “proselytize” in my story, but it would’ve fit quite well as a more specific, mature term.
Of course the average reader more easily understood that he was “selling himself rather than magazines,” and that’s why it was the better choice to go with, but still. I would like to see myself use proselytize in a sentence sometime soon.
Also, don’t read too much into my saying ‘selling himself.’ I know you internet, you’ll make anything dirty, but this is not the time.
Stop it.
Well that’s my ten-dollar word of the day. I actually enjoy seeing things like ‘words of the day’ on every online dictionary and goofy calendar ever made, so I might just try to do this again next time I find a new word that’s interesting. If you’d like to see more of it, or if you learned an interesting new word today yourself, let me know down in the comments!
Jason's Blog - Work in Progress 