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Today I heard a daf yomi recording in which the lecturer only would use the expression baysah instead of beitzah. I asked Rabbi Blaut, my daf yomi chavrusa, why this was the case. He told me it was all about proper language. Beitzah, you see, not only means an egg. It also refers to something that a man has two of that resembles a couple of eggs. Therefore some people are stringent and don't say beitzah - they say baysah instead. People know that if you are saying one you are referring to the real word.
It's sort of like in last week's parsha where it says that Noah took 7 of each pure animal and 1 of each not pure animal instead of saying impure. It uses an extra word to teach you to be careful how you speak and to not use negative phrasing when you can possibly use positive phrasing.
Anyone doing nanowrimo this year? I know last year one of you threatened the equivalent of kareis to anyone who mentioned it but if you really want to cut me off after this many of years of us reading each other's journals for me mentioning that, it makes me more than a little sad.
I have a little more writing to do before I go to bed. Today I spent a few hours revising THE NOVEL! I am adding a bit of text, believe it or not. Now that it is going into book format I realize that some paragraphs were way too long - a good number of them, actually. I broke up a lot of paragraphs and had to restructure some sentences. I'm debating whether I should edit the book so that there will be no widow words - words that are alone on a line. It just doesn't look so nice in a printed book. Would that be considered going too far?
