My New Word of the Week: Baramin

Thanks to Jon Swift’s delightful analysis of Conservapedia, I learned a new word tonight: baramin.

It turns out that some people consider the word species to be too “secular.” So as an alternative an author came up with baramin, and another resurrected it five decades later in 1990. I would have thought that conservatives would prefer a term that had been around for more than half a millennium to a neologism, but there you go.

Conservapedia defines a baramin as “a lineage of earthly life that that [sic] was originally created by God during the Creation Week.” In that sentence both “life” and “Creation Week” are marked for cross-references, but no one at Conservapedia has bothered to define those yet. I guess they’re not as important as baramins.

As for how to use baramin in a sentence, or at least to form long, complex words from it so as to sound more scholastic, here is part of the Conservapedia entry on kangaroo:

Like all modern animals, modern kangaroos originated in the Middle East and are the descendants of the two founding members of the modern kangaroo baramin that were taken aboard Noah's Ark prior to the Great Flood. It has not yet been determined whether kangaroos form a holobarmin with the wallaby, tree-kangaroo, wallaroo, pademelon and quokka, or if all these species [whoops--secularism!] are in fact apobaraminic or polybaraminic.

After the Flood, kangaroos bred from the Ark passengers migrated to Australia. There is debate whether this migration happened over land -- as Australia was still for a time connected to the Middle East before the supercontinent of Pangea broke apart -- or if they rafted on mats of vegetation torn up by the receding flood waters.

Conservatism marches on into the past.