Beloved Luus, I thought that bombard and bombast had more or less the same meaning. Not so, according to the dictionaries. We could say someone bombarded us with his words but not bombasted us with his words unless the person was being pretentious. Luus, I'm not sure that bombard is correct either! Are the people who are mainly negative attacking anyone? They are not playing a good part, but are they attacking?

I'm thinking out loud. Do you think that something like this would work:

Do you really wish to keep back the world from being the Paradise it belongs to be?

OR

Do you really wish to bombast the world with negative thoughts that keep it from being the Paradise it belongs to be?

God can use nouns for verbs if He wants!

Now, translating into r any language may be entirely different from the English in order to convey clearly what God is saying. We all have to understand that. The best translations, staying with the original meaning, may well have to interpret it. What does Normand think?

There is no doubt that you strongly stay with the intent of God's meaning. Thank you, dear Luus.

Gloria and Luus~ To my mind this shows two things that show up regularly. As with any Godwriting, the message is filtered and colored by the particular person receiving the message. And God has infinite Poetic License and loves Play On Words.

I would say the reason this conundrum appears at all is because Gloria thought the two words were similar in meaning as well as sound. In fact the two words come from completely different roots altho in English they both carry a connotation of the booming sound of bombs. Bombard is directly connected with bombing but bombast goes back to cotton padding and is an entirely different word.

In my view, the intent of the original meaning requires bombard. While I can imagine God using "bombast" here privately with a twinkle in His eye, and I would find it amusing, I don't think it would be translatable into other languages and would only cause puzzlement and problems.

I understand we aren't voting here, but I think Luus has the best solution and that Gloria's two alternates water down an effective image. Bombard. Boom! Pardon my bombast.

What sets Heavenletters apart from any other modern day supposed messages from God in my mind is that they are given to Gloria. God broke the mold for sure when she was born. There is absolutely no one else like her in the world. No one else has read all those books and seen all those movies and moved amongst such an astounding cast of characters that has surrounded her since birth. This allows God to select from what must be millions of images, if not billions, to get His point across. Going for five thousand messages and all different and unique. I think God must in particular enjoy using Gloria to exercise what strikes me as an extremely subtle sense of humor and playfulness. Oftentimes when I am reading a message, I think to myself, "Now how in the world is anyone going to be able to translate that?"

Sorry to arrive late with my comment. I don't receive anymore (since quite a while, in fact) notice when a new post on the Translator forum arrives. So I tend to forget to go regularly to the forum.

Concerning "bombast", even if I found a bit unusual the use of this word by God, I think I would maintain "bombast" rather than "bombard".

Bombast refers to grandiloquent, pompous speech or writing. The idea is "inflated speech", And it goes with the preceeding idea of "dissolving the supremacy of the negative". Because people have a tendancy to exagerate, inflate in their speech the negative aspects of the world.

Of course, this is only my interpretation.

Normand, I'm thinking that out of all the translators, you would have the easiest time if "bombast" is retained because both words come into English by way of Old French. I'm guessing that the two words sound similar in modern French the same as in English and the same word play might work, if indeed that was the original intention. Probably not in Russian or Chinese.

I want to make clear that I ordinarily shrink from copyediting God, and that I think God has every right to use nouns as verbs or to stretch meaning way beyond what most people can get away with. It's just in this case that it looks to me like there was some static on the line when that particular word was given.

In the preceding thoughts, God is observing us dwelling on the insufficiencies of life, keeping a negative frame of mind, upholding the supremacy of the negative. This presents a picture of us as downcast, complaining, whining, dejected, defeated, and it is quite possible to bombard the world and the entire Universe with such negativity. I speak from experience.

I don't believe you can project that depressive atmosphere with bombast. Bombast is loud and arrogant and puffed up , the complete opposite of the picture God has just painted. The only way it makes any sense at all to me is knowing that Gloria thought the two words were sort of synonymous until she looked them up in the dictionary, and that this might have caused the original thought to take a wrong turn.

What to do indeed. I suppose the most logical solution would be to ask God what He intended, and Gloria would be the one to do that. She might not feel comfortable doing it and would prefer to leave it as it stands. There are a number of instances in the Hebrew scriptures of words that either don't make sense as copied down, or sometimes no one today even knows what the word means.

I don't think it would hurt to leave the word as "bombast" in the English even tho it doesn't really make sense in context, but I would suggest letting translators use "bombard" if it worked better for them. The original meaning of bombard wasn't dropping explosives out of a plane, but the first cannons that were used to fire large rocks, a step up from the catapault, which fits in with lobbing moans and groans into the atmosphere. I would still ask God first.