Megachurch Pastor John Hagee Solemnly Admits to “Crankin Hog All Crazy Style” and “Slurpin Down Lean”
A nationally broadcast sermon of fifty-one minutes and forty-four seconds contains eleven verbatim occurrences of the same two phrases, each one followed by a further admission, and no admission is ever repeated. Reality Daily has timed all eleven, transcribed the pivot four separate times, checked every sentence in the broadcast against four reference works, and asked two seminaries what any of it means. Neither has replied.
Editor's Note
This story was held for nine days while the Standards Desk attempted to obtain comment from the ministry, from two seminaries, and from the affiliate that carried the broadcast. Nineteen written requests were sent. One was answered, in sixty-one words, which we reprint below in full and parse clause by clause because sixty-one words is what we were given.
The Standards Desk voted four to one to print both phrases verbatim, in every instance, unaltered and unasterisked. I was the one. I was wrong, and I am recording that I was wrong, because the alternative was a newspaper that reprints a man's confession with the confession removed. He said it into a live microphone on his own network feed eleven times. We are a paper of record. This is the record. — M. Vandersloot
The tape runs fifty-one minutes and forty-four seconds. Reality Daily has it in full, from the ministry’s own house feed, downloaded from the ministry’s own public archive, unedited and unclipped, and this desk has now watched it end to end eleven times — a number we did not choose and noticed only afterward, when the log was totaled.
It is a Sunday evening sermon. It was recorded before roughly twenty-two hundred people at Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, carried live at 8:00 p.m. Central on the ministry’s network and on eleven affiliate stations, and archived within ninety minutes of its conclusion. Its subject, per the printed order of service handed to every person who walked in that night, is the fourth sign in the heavens. John Hagee has been preaching the signs for four decades, wrote the 2013 bestseller Four Blood Moons: Something Is About to Change, saw it made into a film, and has never once been coy about what he believes the sky is doing.
At six minutes and twelve seconds into the broadcast, he departs from the printed order of service and begins to speak about himself as a young man. He does this at full volume, with the choir behind him, building. And then, at the top of the crescendo, he lands — flatly, without irony, without a change in register, without any indication whatsoever that he considers the words unusual — on two phrases.
He was, in his own words, “crankin hog all crazy style.” He was “slurpin down lean.”
He then says it again. He says it eleven times in fifty-one minutes and forty-four seconds, and each time he adds one further admission, and no admission is ever repeated. The Standards Desk has timed all eleven and printed them below, and we have done this not because we find it amusing — we would ask readers to take that on faith, since we cannot prove a state of mind — but because counting things is what this desk is for, and because nobody else has counted them.
“Beloved, I was cooked. I was down bad, no cap. I was crankin hog all crazy style. I was slurpin down lean. And I was fanum taxin a widow’s plate lunch on the Lord’s day.”— Broadcast SES-2440, timecode 06:12, transcript lines 187–191
There is a second finding in this broadcast, and it is the larger one, and this newspaper spent six days confirming it before it would print it. Across the entire fifty-one minutes and forty-four seconds, the Standards Desk cannot identify a single complete sentence spoken by the pastor that is in standard English.
I. The Broadcast
The program carries the designation SES-2440 in the ministry’s archive. It was recorded on the evening of Sunday, 16 August. Reality Daily downloaded the file on 22 August at 4:11 p.m. Eastern, retained the hash, retained the download log, and has not altered a frame. The file we watched is the file the ministry published. We want that established before anything else in this story is read, because it will be the first thing disputed and it is the one thing we can prove.
We also obtained the printed order of service for that evening. It runs to two pages, it was handed out at four doors, and it is the least ambiguous document in this investigation. It lists the sermon by title. It allots the sermon thirty-four minutes.
The sermon runs fifty-one minutes and forty-four seconds. It is seventeen minutes and forty-four seconds longer than the piece of paper that announced it, which is not by itself remarkable — pastors run long, and the Standards Desk has no view on how long a sermon ought to be — but which becomes a fact once you ask what occupies the extra seventeen minutes.
What occupies them is the young manhood of John Hagee, described at length, in a vernacular this newspaper has been unable to source to any reference work published in the English language.
The order of service does not mention a confession. It lists, after the sermon, a benediction and a closing hymn, and both of these occurred, on schedule, and the hymn was “It Is Well With My Soul.” The benediction, which we have also transcribed, is twenty-seven words long and contains four terms our reference shelf does not have. We print it in Section IV.
II. Eleven Occurrences, and the Clause That Never Repeats
The Standards Desk logs every broadcast it examines against a running timecode taken from the file itself rather than from any published run sheet. The count is eleven. Both anchor phrases, delivered together, in that order, within the same breath group, eleven separate times.
The couplet does not vary. Not by a word, not by a syllable, not by an inflection our four transcribers could agree on hearing. What follows the couplet varies every single time, and it is never repeated, and by the eleventh occurrence the pastor has admitted to eleven separate things.
We print all eleven, in order, verbatim.
- 06:12 — “I was fanum taxin a widow’s plate lunch on the Lord’s day.”
- 09:48 — “I was bustin down sturdy behind a Whataburger at two in the mornin, and I was not sorry, beloved, and that is the sin of it.”
- 14:03 — “I was goonin till the streetlights come on.”
- 18:37 — “I took the whole opp pack to Ohio. All of them. I sent them to Ohio.”
- 22:19 — “I was mewin in a Sonic parkin lot for eleven hours and I called it fastin.”
- 27:55 — “I was glazin a man who had not earned the glaze.” Our log records nineteen seconds of congregational response, the longest in the broadcast.
- 31:40 — “I hit the griddy on consecrated ground.”
- 36:08 — “I was throwin unsolicited rizz at a churchgoin woman in the vestibule of a house of God.”
- 41:22 — “I ratioed my own mother, beloved, in front of the whole family, at Thanksgivin, and I sat there in that W like I had earned it.”
- 47:16 — “I was delulu. I was down horrendous. I had no aura and I was spendin it anyway.”
- 50:51 — “I was so cooked. Chat, I was cooked.” Final occurrence. Thirty-eight seconds later the broadcast ends.
Here is the finding, and we would ask that it be quoted in full rather than in half. Eleven times a man stood in a pulpit and named a thing he had done, and eleven times the thing was a different thing, and not one of the eleven was walked back, softened, contextualized or explained at any point in the remaining broadcast. He does not return to any of them. He does not appear to consider that anybody would ask.
The mean interval from the end of the couplet to the beginning of the next admission is one point nine seconds. There is no hesitation anywhere in the sequence. We had a fourth staffer check the arithmetic, which is our practice, and which has become, in this newsroom, a small joke that nobody explains to visitors.
III. The Pivot, Transcribed
What follows is taken from our own transcript, prepared under the desk’s ordinary protocol. Bracketed material is descriptive and is ours. Everything unbracketed is his.
1412 HAGEE: There were seasons, beloved. There were
1413 seasons on a young man, and I will not stand in
1414 this pulpit and tell you I walked them clean. I
1415 was crankin hog all crazy style. I was slurpin
1416 down lean. I was delulu. I was down horrendous.
1417 I had no aura and I was spendin it anyway.
That is the tenth occurrence, at 47:16. The register does not change. There is no pause before the admission and no pause after it. He does not lower his voice for it and he does not raise it. Our four transcribers, working independently, all four marked the same absence of any tonal shift, which is the only thing in this section of tape, apart from the couplet, on which all four agreed.
The fifth occurrence, at 22:19, is the most compressed:
0641 HAGEE: Crankin hog. All crazy style. Slurpin
0642 down lean. [CHOIR: sustained, 4 sec] Mewin in a
0643 Sonic parkin lot for eleven hours. And I called
0644 it fastin, beloved. I called that fastin.
The eleventh, at 50:51, is the longest, the loudest, and the only one the congregation answers twice:
1479 HAGEE: I was crankin hog all crazy style.
1480 [CONGREGATION: response, 6 sec]
1481 I was slurpin down lean.
1482 [CONGREGATION: response, 9 sec]
1483 I was so cooked. Chat, I was cooked. And the
1484 Lord said bet.
Nine seconds of response. We timed the response.
Between the ninth and tenth occurrences there is a passage of two minutes and eleven seconds in which the pastor addresses the congregation directly on the subject of their own conduct, and we print it because it is the only sustained passage in the broadcast that is not about himself:
“Some of y’all are in here glazin each other and callin it fellowship. Some of y’all got the ick about a brother and you will not say it to his face, you will say it to your group chat. That is opp behavior, beloved. That is Ohio behavior. And I know, because I was the opp. I was the whole pack. I have been every single one of you, and worse, and the Lord looked at me and said bet.”— Broadcast SES-2440, timecode 44:02, transcript lines 1,388–1,401
At 33:19, on the subject of the affiliate stations carrying the broadcast:
“They asked me would I tone it down for the network. I said respectfully, no. I have been mid one time in my life and I did not care for it.”— Broadcast SES-2440, timecode 33:19
And at 19:04, in the middle of a passage on repentance, in what our transcribers marked as the quietest delivery on the tape:
“I am not the main character. I thought I was the main character. Beloved, I was an NPC in my own testimony and the Lord was runnin the whole map.”— Broadcast SES-2440, timecode 19:04
IV. The Lexicon, and the Lexicographer
Standards Desk protocol requires that any term quoted from a broadcast be checked against the reference shelf before it is printed, so that we do not reproduce a term of art while believing it to be idiom, or the reverse. We checked. We checked four works: a standard theological wordbook in its fourth edition, a two-volume dictionary of biblical languages, a concordance of homiletic usage in North American evangelical preaching, 1870 to the present, and the ministry’s own published glossary, which runs to eleven pages and is available as a download.
QUERY: crankin hog all crazy style .. 0 RESULTS IN 4 WORKS
QUERY: slurpin down lean ........... 0 RESULTS IN 4 WORKS
QUERY: fanum tax ................... 0 RESULTS IN 4 WORKS
QUERY: bustin down sturdy .......... 0 RESULTS IN 4 WORKS
QUERY: goonin ...................... 0 RESULTS IN 4 WORKS
QUERY: mewin ....................... 0 RESULTS IN 4 WORKS
QUERY: glazin ...................... 1 RESULT (confectionery)
QUERY: aura ........................ 1 RESULT (unrelated)
QUERY: delulu ...................... 0 RESULTS IN 4 WORKS
QUERY: bet ......................... 0 RESULTS IN THIS SENSE
The Desk then did the thing it had been avoiding, which took four days: we checked every sentence in the broadcast rather than only the phrases we had come for. There are, by our count, nine hundred and six complete sentences in SES-2440. Eight hundred and ninety-one of them contain at least one term absent from all four reference works. The remaining fifteen are scripture, quoted, in the King James, and correctly.
There is no sentence in the fifty-one minutes and forty-four seconds that is both the pastor’s own and in standard English. Not one. Including the benediction, which we print in full, as delivered:
“Go in peace. Stay locked in. Touch grass. The Lord is not delulu about you and He never was — and beloved, that is the whole gospel. Amen.”— Broadcast SES-2440, benediction, timecode 51:12
We wrote to two seminaries. The Chalmers Institute of Biblical Languages in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and the Danforth School of Divinity in Erie, Pennsylvania. Both were sent the phrases in isolation, without the pastor’s name, without the broadcast designation, and without any indication that a news organization was involved beyond the letterhead. Both were asked one question: does any of this language have a recognized usage in homiletic or scriptural context, and if so, what is it. Eleven written requests to each, by post and by electronic mail. Neither has replied. The twelfth request to each went out on 28 August, which under this paper’s standards is the last one we send.
Internally, the Desk did what it always does with contested tape: four staffers transcribed the 47:00–48:00 minute independently, without conferring, and their transcripts were compared. No two matched. They disagreed on where the sentence ends, on whether the pause after “beloved” is a comma or a full stop, on whether an emphatic is one emphatic or two, and on the total word count, by a spread of six words.
All four transcripts contain the couplet. Identically. Same words, same order, same spelling, no hyphens, no apostrophes. Four people who could not agree on a comma agreed on “crankin hog all crazy style” without conferring, which is the strongest internal verification this desk has ever recorded on any piece of audio, and which we would trade in an instant for one sentence from either seminary.
We then retained Rowena Trask, who spent thirty-one years as a senior editor on a North American dictionary of record, the last nine of them on the citation file. She is retired and lives in Vermont. She was given the full transcript, with no context, and asked to describe it.
Her memorandum runs to nineteen pages. On the first phrase, she is entirely straightforward. Crank, she writes, is a verb of long standing, attested from the fifteenth century in the mechanical sense of turning by hand, and productive in American vernacular in the sense of operating an implement vigorously and at length. Hog is Old English hogg and requires no gloss. The terminal element is an adverbial intensifier of a construction well attested in twentieth-century American vernacular English, in which a manner adverbial is formed by suffixing the noun style to a modifier, and it is in her judgment the least interesting part of the phrase.
Her conclusion on the lexicon, printed in full:
“Every phrase in this document is well formed. Every element in each of them is English and every element is doing a job. They are grammatical, and they are idiomatic, and they are not in the dictionary, and those three things are perfectly compatible. As to what any of it denotes, I have no idea, and I will not guess in print. Grammar is my jurisdiction. The referent is yours.”— Rowena Trask, retired senior editor, dictionary citation file, 31 years
On fanum tax she is briefer. It is, she writes, “a compound of a proper noun I cannot place and a fiscal term I can,” and she notes that the construction implies an established levy, a levying party and a party levied upon, and that a levy implies a system, and that a system implies more than one occasion. Her closing line on that entry is one sentence: “I would want to know who is collecting.”
On slurpin down lean she notes slurp as imitative, reaching English through Dutch, and lean as attested in American use as a mass noun in a sense she describes as “beverage-adjacent and regionally specific,” about which she declines to elaborate further. She would want to see it in a second independent source before she would enter it.
Reality Daily has a second independent source. It is the same broadcast, ten more times. It also has, as of 29 August, forty-one more broadcasts, and that is Section V.
Standards Note — On Not Elaborating
This newspaper is not going to describe what any of these phrases refers to. That is not squeamishness and it is not delicacy. It is that we do not know, we could not establish it, the lexicographer would not speculate, the seminaries did not answer, and the ministry declined to characterize its own pastor’s language. We print words we can source and we do not print inferences we cannot. Readers who feel they know what the phrases mean are welcome to that knowledge and are asked not to write to us about it, as roughly nine hundred of them already have.
V. The Archive, 1981 to the Present
On 27 August a reader wrote to say that she had been attending since 1994 and that the pastor had always talked like that. The Standards Desk treated this as an assertion to be checked and not as a joke, pulled forty-one archived broadcasts spanning 1981 to 2026, and sampled six minutes from each.
The reader is correct.
From a broadcast dated 8 March 1981, at 14:40, on the subject of the prodigal son:
“That boy took the bag and he went to Ohio with it. And when the bag was gone, beloved, the ones that was glazin him would not even look at him. That is not your friend. That is a fair-weather NPC.”— Archived broadcast, 8 March 1981, timecode 14:40
From 12 November 1994, at 31:02:
“You cannot rizz your way past the judgment seat. I have tried it. I stood there with the whole rizz and the Lord said, respectfully, that is mid.”— Archived broadcast, 12 November 1994, timecode 31:02
From 4 June 2007, at 08:55, in a sermon on the Beatitudes:
“Blessed are the ones who is locked in. Blessed are the ones who touch grass. Blessed are the ones who do not have to be the main character, for theirs is the aura that does not run out.”— Archived broadcast, 4 June 2007, timecode 08:55
Forty-one broadcasts. Forty-five years. The vocabulary does not develop, does not date, does not drift and does not modernize. The terms that appear in 1981 appear in 2026 in the same senses and the same constructions, at the same rate, with the same confidence, to congregations that at no point in forty-five years are recorded on any tape as reacting to them at all.
We put this to Ms. Trask, whose reply was the only time in nine days that anyone we contacted asked us to stop talking so she could think.
“Vernacular of this kind is normally datable to within about four years by its own vocabulary, because it turns over that fast. This does not turn over. I have been handed a body of speech that is internally consistent across forty-five years and attested nowhere in my citation file before roughly 2019, and one of those two facts has to be wrong. I do not currently know which. Please do not print that I do know.”— Rowena Trask, supplementary memorandum, 30 August
We are printing that she does not know. It is the only thing anybody has said to us about this broadcast that we have been able to verify twice.
VI. The Sky, Briefly
Underneath the whole of it is the sermon’s printed subject, which is the sky, and about which we will be short, because it is the part of this story that has already been reported.
Dr. Ileana Sobczak is an associate professor of observational astronomy at a state university in the mountain west. A lunar tetrad, she explained, is four consecutive total lunar eclipses with no partial eclipse between them, and it is a consequence of arithmetic. The eclipses of 2014 and 2015 fell in a tetrad, and they fell on Jewish holidays because the Hebrew calendar is lunar. The coincidence is not a coincidence. It is a definition.
“They were computed and printed decades before they happened. Anybody could have looked them up. Anybody still can — the tables run centuries out in both directions. I’d be glad to send you the file. It’s about four megabytes and it is, I think, one of the most beautiful documents human beings have ever produced.”— Dr. Ileana Sobczak, associate professor of observational astronomy
We accepted. The file arrived nineteen minutes later with a one-line note reading “enjoy the 2200s.” It is a beautiful document, and it is on our corridor wall, and it settles nothing, because a thing being predictable does not tell you what it means. We put that to Dr. Sobczak. Her reply, in full: “That’s fair. That part isn’t mine.”
VII. The Reconciliation
Here is the method, and we want it stated plainly because it will be mischaracterized as mockery, and it is not mockery.
Reality Daily treats a prophecy the way it treats an invoice. A claim was declared on a date. A consequence was stated. Time passed. Something was subsequently recorded, or nothing was. That is all a reconciliation is. It is what a bookkeeper does at the end of a month, and a bookkeeper does not sneer at the ledger — a bookkeeper simply wants the two columns to agree, and is troubled when they do not, and keeps working until they do or until somebody signs off on the variance.
Over four weeks the Standards Desk assembled every publicly declared sign we could source to a date and a stated consequence, from 2013 forward, and set beside each one the outcome recorded by ordinary means — wire copy, the National Weather Service daily record, the trade sales figures, and the calendar.
The ledger does not balance. Against eleven declared consequences we could locate one recorded outcome that matched its entry, and the other ten resolve to no change recorded, to a Tuesday, to four tenths of an inch of rain, to a second printing.
Reality Daily takes no satisfaction in this. A ledger that will not balance is not a joke and it is not a victory. It is a document somebody has to carry. Somewhere there is a person who read the 2013 book and adjusted a life around it, and that person is carrying a variance nobody has signed off on, and the Standards Desk thinks about that person more than it thinks about the broadcast.
One line reconciles. It is the last line, and it is the confession. A man stood up on 16 August and stated eleven times that he had done a thing, and stated eleven different things, and the tape records him stating all of it, and the tape and the man agree exactly, to the second. It is the only item on this broadcast that reconciles to anything, and we are obliged by our own protocol to mark it CLOSED, and we have.
VIII. The Tape, and the Woman in Row Nine
Delmer Fuqua ran broadcast audio for a large church in Texas for twenty-two years and is now retired in Bandera. He did not work on this broadcast and has no connection to this ministry, and he asked us to print both of those facts before anything else he said. We are printing them.
We sent him the file and asked one narrow technical question: is there any edit point in the fifty-one minutes.
He called back in under an hour. A house feed of this kind, he explained, records to a single continuous timecode roll with one unbroken room-mic bed underneath the program mix, and that bed is the thing you cannot fake — the ambient noise floor of a two-thousand-seat room has a signature, and the signature is continuous across the whole fifty-one minutes and forty-four seconds.
“There’s no edit in it. Nobody put those words in there, and nobody took anything out around them. I ran sound for preachers for twenty-two years, honey, and I never once met one who said a thing eleven times by accident.”— Delmer Fuqua, retired church broadcast engineer, Bandera, Texas
Loretta Bynum-Kessel is seventy-one, a retired school-cafeteria manager, and was in the building that evening in seat 9-C, which she has held for nineteen years. She agreed to speak to us on the telephone for eleven minutes and was gracious for all eleven.
We asked her whether anything in the sermon of 16 August struck her as unusual.
She said no.
We read her the couplet and all eleven admissions from our transcript and asked whether she had heard them, and she said that she had, that she had heard them clearly, and that she had understood him perfectly. We asked what she had understood. She said she was not going to explain a sermon to a newspaper. We asked whether she would consider elaborating on the record, on any one of the eleven, at any length. She said no, kindly, and asked after the weather in Virginia.
We have no further questions for Mrs. Bynum-Kessel. She was there, she heard it, she understood it, and she is under no obligation whatsoever to translate it for four people in a rented room above a former appliance showroom. Of everyone this desk contacted over nine days, she is the only one who came away from the broadcast with more than she brought to it.
IX. The Statement, Parsed
Nineteen written requests for comment produced one response, received 27 August at 6:52 p.m. Eastern, sixty-one words, unsigned, from a communications address. We reprint it in full because that is our policy and because sixty-one words is what we were given:
Statement of the Ministry, received 27 August, 6:52 p.m. EDT, in full
“Pastor Hagee’s message of August 16 speaks for itself, in its entirety, and we would encourage anyone with questions about it to watch it in full. The ministry does not comment on the private history of any believer, including that of its own pastor, and does not confirm or characterize language attributed to a broadcast by third parties. The signs remain.”
Clause one. We agree that the message speaks for itself and we accept the encouragement to watch it in full. We have watched it in full eleven times. That is the problem. It speaks for itself with total clarity, at length, at volume, and what it says is the eleven things listed in Section II of this article.
Clause two. The ministry does not comment on the private history of any believer. Reality Daily did not ask about a private history. We asked about a public broadcast. The history in question was made public by the man himself on his own network, and a thing a man announces to twenty-two hundred people and eleven affiliates has left the category of private history and entered the category of the record.
Clause three. The ministry “does not confirm or characterize language attributed to a broadcast by third parties.” No third party attributed anything. There is no third party in this story. The file is the ministry’s file, hosted on the ministry’s archive, downloaded from the ministry’s server, of the ministry’s pastor, and the language is on it. We are not attributing. We are quoting.
Clause four. “The signs remain.” This is the only affirmative claim in the statement, it is offered without a date, without a consequence, and without a mechanism, and it is the only sentence in the sixty-one words we cannot put in the ledger, because a claim with no stated consequence cannot be reconciled against anything. We have opened a category for it. The category has one entry.
We note, without drawing a conclusion from it, that the statement is the only document in this investigation originating with the ministry that is written in standard English throughout.
X. What We Are Not Saying
Reality Daily wishes to be exact, because this story will be summarized by people who have not watched the tape.
We are not saying the pastor did anything wrong as a young man. We do not know what he did as a young man. We know what he said he did, in his own words, on his own feed, eleven times, in eleven particulars, and we have printed those words and no others, and we have added nothing to them.
We are not saying we know what the words mean. We asked a lexicographer of thirty-one years, two seminaries and four of our own staff. The lexicographer told us the phrases are grammatical and declined to go further. The seminaries have not replied. Our own transcribers agreed on nothing except the phrases themselves. We are a broadsheet. We do not know, and we are telling you that we do not know, which is more than has been done with this broadcast anywhere else.
We are not saying the forty-five-year archive proves anything about the vocabulary’s origin. Ms. Trask has told us plainly that two facts in her file cannot both be true and that she does not know which one is wrong. We have printed her uncertainty at the length she asked for and we are not going to improve on it.
We are not saying belief is foolish. The congregation of Cornerstone Church is not on trial in this newspaper and never will be. Mrs. Bynum-Kessel understood the sermon of 16 August. Four trained transcribers and a retired dictionary editor did not. That is a fact about us, not about her.
We are not saying the ledger proves anything. A ledger does not prove. A ledger records, and then somebody has to sign it.
And we are not saying the man is insincere. That is the part that has kept this desk here past midnight for nine days running. He does not sound like a man performing. He sounds, at 50:51, with the choir under him and nine seconds of response coming back off two thousand people, like a man telling the truth about himself as plainly as he knows how — in words the English language has not yet issued a dictionary entry for, to a room that did not blink.
XI. Conclusion
Fifty-one minutes and forty-four seconds. Eleven occurrences of a couplet that never varies and eleven admissions that never repeat. Nine hundred and six sentences, of which eight hundred and ninety-one are in a vernacular no reference work on our shelf contains, and the fifteen that are not are scripture, quoted correctly. Forty-one archived broadcasts across forty-five years in which the vocabulary does not age. Four independent transcripts that agree on almost nothing and on those two phrases absolutely. Two seminaries, twenty-four letters, no reply. One lexicographer who says it is grammatical, says the dating is impossible, and asked us to print that she does not know.
And a ledger of eleven declared signs against eleven recorded outcomes, in which the only line that reconciles is the one where a man told the truth about himself, eleven times, in eleven particulars, at eight o’clock on a Sunday evening, in front of two thousand people who did not find it remarkable.
We would like somebody to sign the variance. We are not particular about who.
■ ■ ■
Reality Daily has offered the ministry unlimited space in which to respond, at any length, in full, unedited, with no commentary from us whatsoever, and specifically including the opportunity to tell this newspaper what any of the eleven admissions mean, which is the only thing we have wanted from anybody since 22 August.
We have held that space since 24 August. It remains open, and it will remain open, and if the answer arrives in eleven years it will be printed at the top of this page above everything written here, with our own reporting moved down to make room for it.
Until then, there is the tape. Fifty-one minutes and forty-four seconds, one unbroken timecode roll, no edit point, the room’s noise floor continuous from end to end. He said it eleven times. He meant to say it eleven times. And the last thing he said to twenty-two hundred people, before the benediction and the hymn, was that the Lord had looked at all of it and said bet.
Corrections & Clarifications
Update, 07:31 — An earlier version of this article reported the mean interval between the couplet and the admission that follows it as one point nine seconds. Following an independent recount by the Standards Desk, the mean interval is one point nine seconds. The original figure stands.
Update, 12:08 — We initially wrote that the sermon ran seventeen minutes longer than the printed order of service allotted. The correct figure is seventeen minutes and forty-four seconds. We regret the imprecision and note that it does not affect the finding, which was eleven, and remains eleven.
Update, 16:45 — A reader has written to advise that lunar tetrads are ordinary predictable astronomical events. Reality Daily agrees, established this at length in Section VI with an astronomer who supplied the tables, and thanks the reader for confirming that our Section VI is being read.
Update, 19:20 — Several readers have written to say that the eleven admissions are ordinary contemporary slang and that this newspaper is the last institution in America to notice. We do not dispute it. Our difficulty is Section V, in which the same vocabulary appears in a broadcast recorded in 1981, and about which the reader mail has so far been silent.
Sources & Documentation
- Broadcast SES-2440, complete program file, 51:44, downloaded from the ministry's public archive 22 August, 4:11 p.m. EDT. SHA-256 hash retained; download log retained; file unaltered.
- Printed order of service, evening of 16 August, 2 pp. Sermon allotted 34 minutes. Obtained from a person who attended and who asked for nothing.
- Reality Daily Standards Desk. Timecode Log, SES-2440: Eleven Occurrences with Intervals to First Lunar Reference. 6 pp.
- Reality Daily Standards Desk. Sentence-Level Concordance of SES-2440 Against Four Reference Works. 61 pp. 906 sentences examined; 891 contain at least one term unattested in all four; the remaining 15 are direct scriptural quotation.
- Reality Daily Standards Desk. Archive Sample: Forty-One Broadcasts, 1981–2026, Six Minutes Each. Log, 22 pp. Prompted by reader correspondence of 27 August.
- Trask, R. Supplementary Memorandum on the Dating of the Submitted Vernacular. 3 pp., 30 August. Subject asked that her uncertainty be printed at length and it has been.
- Reality Daily Standards Desk. Four Independent Transcriptions of SES-2440, 47:00–48:00, Prepared Without Conferral. 4 documents; no two in agreement on punctuation, sentence boundary or word count; all four in agreement on both quoted phrases.
- Trask, R. Memorandum on the Formation and Attestation of Two Submitted Phrases. 4 pp. Commissioned by Reality Daily; supplied without context; full memorandum on file.
- Trask, R. Recorded telephone interview, 26 August, 10:14 a.m. EDT. Transcript 22 pp., reviewed and approved by subject.
- Sobczak, I., PhD. Recorded telephone interview, 26 August, 2:00 p.m. MDT. Duration 51 minutes.
- Eclipse canon supplied by Dr. Sobczak, 26 August, 2:19 p.m. MDT, 4.1 MB, covering the years 1501 through 2600. Relevant pages printed and posted in the corridor.
- Fuqua, D. Recorded telephone interview, 29 August, 9:40 a.m. CDT. Subject confirmed continuity of the room-mic bed across the full program duration and the absence of any edit point.
- Bynum-Kessel, L. Telephone interview, 30 August, 11 minutes. Subject declined to elaborate and was not pressed.
- Hagee, J. Four Blood Moons: Something Is About to Change (2013). Publicly available. Consulted for declared signs and stated consequences appearing in the reconciliation.
- National Weather Service, Bexar County daily climatological record, 08 October 2014. Precipitation: 0.4 in.
- Wire copy, 15 April 2014, complete day file. Reviewed in full by the Standards Desk. Day was a Tuesday.
- Trade sales record, weekly religion category, weeks ending 03 October 2015 and 10 October 2015. Second printing recorded.
- Theological wordbook, 4th ed.; two-volume dictionary of biblical languages; concordance of homiletic usage in North American evangelical preaching, 1870–present; ministry's published glossary, 11 pp. Neither phrase appears in any of the four, in any of the thirty-one spelling variants constructed by this desk.
- Reality Daily Standards Desk. Record of Written Requests to the Chalmers Institute of Biblical Languages, Rock Hill, S.C. 12 entries. 0 responses.
- Reality Daily Standards Desk. Record of Written Requests to the Danforth School of Divinity, Erie, Pa. 12 entries. 0 responses.
- Statement of the ministry, received 27 August, 6:52 p.m. EDT, 61 words, unsigned, from a communications address. Reprinted in full in Section VIII.
- Reality Daily Standards Desk. Correspondence File RD-C-5522, Requests for Comment to Ministry, Affiliate and Network, 22–31 August. 19 entries; 1 response.
- Affiliate carriage list, 11 stations, as published by the network in its own promotional material.
- Reality Daily Legal. Memorandum on Publication of Verbatim Quotation from a Publicly Broadcast Confession. 3 pp.
- Reality Daily Standards Desk. Vote Record, 31 August: four to one in favour of verbatim publication, both phrases, unaltered, all eleven instances. Dissent recorded by the Editor-in-Chief and withdrawn by her the same evening.
- Reader Correspondence File RD-C-5523, 906 letters received explaining the phrases to this newspaper. None from a seminary. None cited.
- Reality Daily Standards Desk. Category of Unreconcilable Claims, opened 1 September. One entry: “The signs remain.”
- The tape. Fifty-one minutes and forty-four seconds. He said it eleven times.
Reader Response — 5,900 comments
I was there. I am the lady in seat 9-C and I told the reporter on the telephone that I understood him perfectly, and I did, and I am not going to explain a sermon in a comment section either. She was very polite about it. It was a good service and the hymn at the end was lovely.
For anybody arguing about this in the replies: the room bed is continuous. You can see it on a spectrogram in about four seconds. There's no splice at 50:51, there's no splice anywhere, and whoever is saying the choir was laid in afterward has never sat behind a console in their life.
The eleven timestamps are what did it for me. Anybody can say a thing once. Eleven times, with a different admission attached to every single one and never the same one twice, is not a slip of the tongue, that is a structure.
my grandma sent me this article with no message. no context. just the link. i am 23 years old and i have now read the phrase “fanum taxin a widow’s plate lunch” in a newspaper that also has a Standards Desk. i do not know how to explain to her why i am crying.
I have preached for thirty-one years and I want to say plainly that if a man in my pulpit told two thousand people he had been goonin till the streetlights come on, I would want to know a great deal more about that sentence before I printed a ledger about the sky. That is my only note. Otherwise a fine piece of work.
Respectfully, this is nineteen minutes of reading to establish that a preacher said a phrase you refuse to define and then a table of things that didn't happen. Incredible paper. Never change.
@A. Kowalczyk — Correct on every count, and we would only adjust the emphasis. We refuse to define the phrase because we could not define it, and we said so rather than guessing, which is the difference between this page and the eleven hundred posts that defined it this afternoon without asking anyone. And yes: the table is a list of things that did not happen, set against eleven statements that they would. That is what a reconciliation is. We have added your summary to the correspondence file.
I do reconciliations for a living, for a mid-size municipality, and I want to say that the line about somebody having to carry a variance is the truest sentence I have read about my job in twenty-six years. I did not expect to find it in a story about the moon.
The paper has represented my memorandum accurately, including the part where I declined to go further, which several people writing to me privately seem to regard as cowardice. It is not cowardice. It is a citation file with one citation in it. Bring me a second and I will read it.
"Grammar is my jurisdiction. The referent is yours." I am having this printed on a mug and I am sending one to every editor I have ever worked for.
Wrote to both seminaries myself this afternoon as a private citizen. Will report back. Somebody in this country has to know what it means and I refuse to believe it is only the lady in seat 9-C.