BY MATT SCHUR

Last week I saw a quotation at @deadsoulpoetry on X (formerly Twitter) that said, “2000 years from now, people will not understand the difference between butt dial and booty call, and this is exactly why the Bible is hard to understand.”

While I would personally replace “is hard to understand” with “takes work to understand,” the overall point is the same.

Context matters.

Butt Dial or Booty Call?

Butt and booty are synonyms (or can be, at least). Call and dial can also be very close in meaning. Put them together, however, and you have two phrases that mean entirely different things.

Those of us who are familiar with the terms butt dial and booty call recognize the difference.

But what if you were a linguist two thousand years from now, your specialty was twenty-first century English, you came across those two terms in a manuscript in an ancient format called Facebook, and you had not yet discovered the Rosetta Stone of our time period’s slang known as the Urban Dictionary?

Context Clues

By examining what comes before and after those phrases, you could probably glean that in this case, the word booty is not referring to a pirate’s treasure, but to a person’s rear end. Call might be a bit more difficult, but with context you can make out that it means to contact somebody, and thankfully this particular passage references a phone, so chances are that that’s what you’re using.

So then you look at butt dial. Being extremely lucky with the passage you’re studying, you can tell that these two words also are referring to a person’s rear end and phone usage.

Since the parallel words in each phrase have parallel meanings, it would stand to reason that the two phrases also had at least similar meanings.

You would be hilariously wrong.

Without cultural and historical context and without a working knowledge of the slang of the time and place, you as a linguist would almost certainly miss the point of whatever it is you’re reading.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/notthatkindofchristian/2024/01/butt-dial-or-booty-call-biblical-context-matters/