23 comments for “Remember the name

  1. Six votes in, people are doing surprisingly well at getting it right. (This surprises me because I see other variations of it on blog, all the time.)

  2. I remember my grandfather teaching me this when I was a kid. He was the stake president (maybe he had read the handbook recently?) and explained to me that spelling it differently would signify another (splinter group?) church. I still recall that day. It’s odd what stays with you.

  3. Kaimi, the more interesting question, IMO, is the whole issue of whether the Church can ever be called the “Mormon Church.”

    With the Church itself using the term “Mormon Church” on occasion (for SEO reasons), the old prohibition seems to be fading a little.

  4. …which is a trademark owned by a Corporation called “The Corporation of the First Presidency”.

  5. I wonder how many people notice that the name of the church, when written in mid-sentence, capitalises the “The” as part of the official name.

    I believe it was a member of the General Primary Presidency (maybe the General President) who mentioned this during a Tuesday evening fireside when I was at the MTC.

  6. After all, it is “The” Church of Jesus Christ, not A church of his. That capital “The” carries a lot of meaning.

  7. The hyphen and lower case “d” in Latter-day really annoys me for some reason. I guess its because all my training tells me that Latter-day should not actually be a hyphenated word at all but rather “Latter” is the adjective that describe the noun “Day”.

  8. The reorganized church used the “Latter-Day” format (capital “D”) until they totally changed their name; i.e., The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

  9. Not that it will help people spell it right, but listening to “The Book of Mormon” cast recording, I was thinking that church leaders should appreciate its use of the correct name of the church.

    We’re fighting for a cause
    But we’re really really nice
    We are the army of the Church of Jesus Christ
    of Latter-day Saints

  10. #11: The RLDS used “Latter Day” (not “Latter-Day”), just as the Strangites do. The early church was also “Latter Day.” I’m not sure when the hyphen was added, but I believe it was some time in the 20th century.

    #10: It’s a compound modifier. (I’d link to Wikipedia, but I have no idea how to do that.) “Latter-day” as a unit modifies “saints.” Neither half of the compound adjective modifies the noun by itself. Although you might be able to extract some meaning from “latter saints” or “day saints,” neither of them conveys any of the meaning intended by the compound adjective. The hyphen clarifies that “latter” modifies “day” and “latter-day” modifies saints, so the reader is not left puzzling what a “day saint” might be.

  11. #14 and All: Please excuse my error in message #11 which improperly included a hyphen in the former name of the Community of Christ church. It would have been better to have not commented.

  12. The lower-case D bothers me too, for some reason.

    I was just reading in Quinn’s “The Mormon Hierarchy” last night, and was reminded that at various times Joseph Smith called the Church:

    Church of Christ (1830)
    Church of the Latter Day Saints (1834)
    The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (no hyphen, 1839)

  13. You mean its not the Church of Cheese and Rice of Rattling Snakes? aw, man

  14. I only know that the D in “day” is not capitalized because of an editing class/internship I did with the famous Doris Dant of the BYU Editing Department.

  15. I don’t recall the exact context, but a few years ago I read or saw something that showed what parts of Wikipedia were being edited from Church IP addresses. My memory is that a lot of the changes were simply corrections to get the name of the Church exactly right.

  16. Grammatically, it should be “Latter-Day”, but until the church changes it, “Latter-day” is the official name.

  17. #5 (Ben) – Interestingly enough, when we were in an unfamiliar city trying to find the stake center and we searched for “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”, then “LDS Church” and “Mormon church” on the GPS in the rental car, nothing came up. So then we just searched for all nearby churches and it came up as “Corporation of the President of the Church.” :)

  18. I fully understand the grammer and religious part of the question: “What is the name of the Church?” But from a linguistic view, whatever name I use, and you understand what I mean by that name, is “it’s name”.

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