Retreat? Retreat!

Attic Greek has two words with substantially different meanings that both translate into English as “love.” I won’t spoil the fun; look up their differences, as a little treat.

These types of word complexities reveal an overloadedness to certain English worlds, “free” being another great example ¹. So in Greek class 19 years ago, we had a little fun with:

Dikaeopolis loved his pretty plow

Something milder is going on with the word “retreat” as often used by academics and Catholics ² plus all-remote organizations.

There’s:

• Retreat (nay!): Giving up on your reply-all hell thread, marriage, and so on; painfully generating the grist you’ll need later on for your LinkedIn content mill that’ll become a staple of r/LinkedInLunatics
• Retreat (yay!): Having a long but catered and relatively fun meeting, performing a chill religious ritual, or finally meeting up with the person you’ve only ever seen say “sorry there’s an echo” on Microsoft Teams to have beer ³.

The difference is nicely cleft depending on whether “retreat” is used as a verb (nay!) or a noun (yay!).

But there’s also a “nay/yay” one that straddles these lines for Catholics in particular, I imagine.

The Catholic Church is known for its extreme anti-birth control stance. So someone who’s having presumably a good time but who’s also weirdly orthodox in their views and likes to court some risk could find themselves needing to…beat a retreat, or go on a retreat to stay faithful.

Maybe the plow could help them out?