Today's new word is SELFSAME

Whether this is British English, or just old fashioned, I rarely come across SELFSAME unless reading something old--in this case, G. Campbell Morgan, a famous expository preacher in England over 100 years ago. As long as I don't stumble while reading, I'd just move on. This time I stopped.

"In the early Bible history the throne is unnamed, but it is always there. In the early movements chronicled for us I find men in relation to the throne, submissive, at peace; in rebellion against the throne, disturbed. The throne of God is everywhere. I come at last to the point where the chosen people make their great mistake, and I hear God's explanation of it, "They have rejected me, that I should not be King over them." I come further on until I find this SELFSAME chosen people in the midst of circumstances full of terror. . . "

My big dining room dictionary has several pages for "self" as a noun, adjective, pre-fix, suffix, and a list of hundreds of words, both hyphenated and joined thereof, from self-abandon to self-wrought. SELFSAME seems to mean "exactly the same," or "precisely the same"--probably with a touch of irony or criticism in Morgan's voice, since these 10 volumes (The Westminster Pulpit) are taken from his sermons preached over a 13 year period at Westminster Chapel in London. 2,500 people were showing up to hear him preach on Sunday, so Friday night Bible classes were added and week after week, with notebooks and Bibles in hand, 1,500-1,700 people would show up on Friday night from throughout London.

SELF is one of those very busy, horrid little English words that must give second language people fits. You can say, "payable to self," in correspondence or on a check, or you can make a dress with a "self belt," although few women are sewing dresses these days, and if they are, they are probably using elastic, not the same fabric to cover a stiff material for a belt. You can say, "my own dear self" and your native born neighbor will know what you mean (although you'd sound a bit quaint), but your neighbor born in Turkey might think you somewhat egotistical to be speaking so lavishly. Then there is "self-rising flour," which really isn't because baking powder has been added to it, so there's some cheating going on, just as in "self-made man" because no one is. God was always there, from conception to life outside the womb, to self-diapering stage at the end and all the stages inbetween.