The Mormon dialect in writing

[Jonathon]

I know where this sort of language comes from. I'm just wondering how common it is outside of church. Like I said, I would see stuff fairly frequently in journal articles from professors.

[Primal Curve]

I didn't attend a religious university or a public university staffed mostly with religious people so I couldn't answer that question from that perspective. I'm sure if I had gone to Bob Jones University, Pensacola Christian College or Moody Bible Institute, I would have seen more of that kind of thing. However, I'd rather have had steel wool rammed into my tear ducts.

[Jonathon]

Ouch. That sounds painful.  >.<  

[Noemon]

"Liken" doesn't strike my ear as being particularly strange.  I'm sure I've used it in formal writing before, probably more than once.  "Liken unto", however, is something that it would never even occur to me to use.  The word "unto" strikes my ear as a very forced mannerism, and if I hear it spoken it trips my give-me-a-break-ometer.  If I came across it in, say, modern academic writing I'd probably laugh aloud, honestly.

[Jonathon]

My thoughts exactly. Of course, I wasn't editing your run-of-the-mill academic writing; most of it was religious in nature. But even then, it just sounded phony and laughable.

[Noemon]

When you say that the academic writing was religious in nature, what do you mean exactly?  I took quite a few religious studies classes in college, but none of the secondary texts employed language reminiscent of that used in the primary texts.

[Jonathon]

Most of what we published came from the religion faculty at BYU, so lots of the articles were about things like the history of the church. One book was supposed to be some sort of history textbook from an LDS perspective, but it was sort of a train wreck—I've complained about it here before.

Is that any clearer? They were academic and religious, but not devotional or doctrinal.

[Noemon]

Yeah, that clears it up completely.  Thanks!