Language is so full of nuance that sometimes even the most fluent speakers are unaware of the subtleties of what they’re saying. People spend their whole lives studying such nuance, and I am by no means an expert, but I do find it fascinating; the entire meaning of a statement can be changed by altering a single letter (For example, one of my friends once tried to tell someone, in Spanish, that he enjoyed dinner. Instead of saying, “Me gustó” (“it pleased me”), he said, “Me gusté” (“I pleased myself”), which has some sexual connotations…).

One nuance of English that doesn’t seem widely understood but has very interesting (and often important) implications is the difference between continuous and continual. Both have been defined as “without interruption”, but they don’t mean precisely the same thing. The most useful explanation I’ve encountered is this: when you turn a faucet on, water is running continuously, but when a faucet is leaking, it drips continually. If you’re doing something continuously, you never stop doing it, but if you do it continually, you do it intermittently but constantly.

An important implication of this is found in the Book of Mormon. When the prophet Lehi is describing his vision about the Love of God (as represented by the Tree of Life) he describes people “continually holding fast to the rod of iron, until they came forth and fell down and partook of the fruit of the tree” (1 Nephi 8:30). These people made it to the tree by holding continually, not continuously; there were times that they let go, but they still arrived.

The implications aren’t that we should feel fine letting go of the rod, but rather that even in those times that we do let go, when we make a mistake or fall short, we can have hope in our ability to regain our hold and make it back to God and partake of His love.

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