On Thursday, I was in the ”Tuomiokapituli” (Cathedral Chapter house) and I had the chance to examine church language with the help of a couple of dictionaries. Even the name Tuomiokapituli made me think about the meaning and origin of words. I had previously discovered that the related word ”tuomiokirkko” (doom + church, ’cathedral’) includes a translation error. Our Finnish word is based on the Swedish ”domkyrkan”, whose first part comes from the Latin domus ‘home, house.’ Finns mistakenly assumed the Germanic dom ’doom’, and so our churches are much more threatening than others in Europe. “Kapituli” comes from Latin through Swedish more successfully: capitulum ‘chapter’, capitula ‘the assembly’. I also noticed that church language, in general, includes vocabulary that’s somewhat unfamiliar although the things it refers to still exist. Would it be possible to translate into everyday language words like sin, merciful and pastoral care, so that the meaning would be free from ecclesiastical baggage? Sin could become an evil act, merciful could become gentle, and pastoral care could become counseling. Archaic terms in our own language can sound to us laymen like a form of Church Latin, with the meaning of the strange words being twisted or lost. In the same way, the medieval Latin “hoc est enim corpus meum” was allegedly transformed by misunderstanding to the magic word hocus-pocus.