All we like sheep

This week's column is by Language Editor Joanna Westcombe.

This month, we look at a cultural icon of the English-speaking world ― the King James Bible, which is celebrating its 400th birthday this year. We tell you the story in the magazine (read the first two pages) and on Spotlight Audio (listen to a track here).

The King James Bible was developed especially to be read in churches, and its language is particularly rhythmic and poetic. Charles Jennens used it for the libretto of George Frideric Handel's choral work, Messiah, which includes the famous "Hallelujah chorus". Last Christmas time, Messiah went viral. Millions of people sent each other a YouTube video of a carefully planned "flash mob" event, in which members of a choir mingled among lunchtime shoppers, starting to sing the chorus one by one until everyone was on their feet.

Messiah is special to me. Every year at Easter and Christmas, I sing it with lots of old and spontaneous friends at a church in Munich that has been running "Messiah open sings" for 35 years. The soloists and orchestra are rehearsed, but if you want to sing along with the choruses, you just turn up and join in. The open sing — "Messiah from Scratch" or "Bring It and Sing It" — is popular in the English-speaking world: just ask the 3,000 singers who get together in London's Royal Albert Hall before Christmas every year.

So when I started working on the article about the King James Bible, the language felt very familiar, and bits of Bible verses bounced around in my head as I was writing: "For unto us a child is born...", "Every valley shall be exalted...", "The trumpet shall sound..." I'm also really pleased that a fellow singer, David Case, is reading some extracts from the Bible on our CD this month. (Listen to two of them on the Spotlight Podcast from 6 to 12 April.)

And in case the title of this blog post made you think it was going to be about Shaun the Sheep (another YouTube phenomenon), it is a line from the King James Bible: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way." If you know the Messiah version, you'll probably have it bouncing around in your head for the rest of the day, too.

*Try two issues of Spotlight for only €9: details here. And get two months' worth of Spotlight Audio for only a little more.