Monday, October 04, 2021

No, NASA doesn't mean "to deceive" in Hebrew

I've gotten tired of retyping this, so here's a copy to post the next N times I see some flerf claim that it does.

First of all, even if it did, it would matter no more than what the Chevy Nova means in Spanish (also, that didn't happen, see Snopes on Did the Chevrolet Nova Fail to Sell in Spanish-Speaking Countries?).  But if we were going to try to interpret its acronym in Hebrew, it doesn't mean "to deceive" but something much better.  Keep reading.

They usually refer to The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible by James Strong (often called Strong's Concordance), it's a useful reference work, and it's found on many sites that deal with the Bible, e.g Bible Study Tools, Bible Hub or Study Bible, which I'll link to below about the particular words in question.  It has an entry for every word in the Bible, words labeled with H are Hebrew or Aramaic, those with G are Greek, and that letter is followed by a number.  Words derived from the same root are found under the same entry.  The concordance is old enough to be in the public domain, and there are many printed versions.

A slight digression, there are two Hebrew letters, Sin (nothing to do with the English word) and Shin.  They look very similar, Sin has a dot on the left, שׂ, and is pronounced 's', Shin's dot is on the right, שׁ‎, and is pronounced 'sh'.  

Now the word the flat-earthers refer to is H5377, and while the preceding link transliterates it nâshâ, there seem to be some printings that wrote š which is used to represent the sh sound.  There's probably an explanation of all the diacritical marks (that one is called a caron) somewhere in a printed copy.  This image of that edition often accompanies the claim.  So it could be that the first person to make it was confused rather than lying.  


The word that sounds closer to NASA, as it's got an s rather than a sh sound in it, is H5375.  And while, once again, it doesn't matter what an acronym in one language sounds like in a different one, this one meaniing (among other things), wait for it, "to travel" and "to lift up".  I would know this even if it wasn't at the link because I speak Hebrew, but even if I didn't, I once saw that my rabbi had an outline of a wedding sermon in the little book he carried to diverse ceremonies, weddings, funerals, et. al., listing those two, as well as "to marry" (Strong lists that, but I don't think it's used that way in the Bible) and "to forgive".  You can probably reconstruct the whole sermon on your own.


In other news, COVID spelled backward doesn’t mean evil spirit possession in Hebrew

ETA: Usually posting this gets silence or someone just repeats one of the claims, but here's a reply it got in 2018Flatearth: "The Acronym N A S A was taken from the Hebrew word Nahash which means serpent (snake emoji) hence the serpent tongue in the logo."  I responded that the letter in Nachash is a hard ch, not an h, and NASA sounds even less like that than it does like Nasha.'


NASA's own explanation of the red shape is "The red v-shaped wing represents aeronautics"