Peterson worked on The Message throughout the 1990s, translating the original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic texts and paraphrasing them into contemporary American English slang. The translation was published in 2002 and had sold more than 15 million copies by 2018.

Acknowledgement: Great thanks to Chris Aldrich who saw the Quote Investigator article about the saying “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us”. Aldrich notified QI of the germane quotation examined in this new article. Aldrich pointed to its presence in “Walden”. This led QI to create this article and to update the existing article.

Why is the title of the book “The medium is the massage” and not “The medium is the message”? Actually, the title was a mistake. When the book came back from the typesetter’s, it had on the cover “Massage” as it still does. The title was supposed to have read “The Medium is the Message” but the typesetter had made an error. When Marshall saw the typo he exclaimed, “Leave it alone! It’s great, and right on target!” Now there are four possible readings for the last word of the title, all of them accurate: “Message” and “Mess Age,” “Massage” and “Mass Age.”

I miss the thriving blogging culture of circa 1999-2012. People blogged before and after those dates, but that was a period where blogging really had an outsized voice in shaping political and cultural conversation.

“Don’t let them do it!”wailed Peter at the ceiling, as if he was talking to the house, the nursery. “Don’t let Father kill everything.”He turned to his father. “Oh, I hate you!”“Insults won’t get you anywhere.”

There is a need in every generation to keep the language of the gospel message current, fresh, and understandable