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While driving south on a recent trip looking for sunshine in vain, my main squeeze for the past 35 years and I listened to “Holy Cow,” a delightful audiobook about contemporary India by Australian newscaster Sarah Macdonald. She explored some of India’s many religions, including the Sikhs, who consider their holy book, the “Guru Granth Sahib,” a living saint.

Intrigued, I researched it and the best description I found was in Wikipedia, often a good place to begin research because of its breadth of coverage, but only as a springboard to more reliable sources.

According to Wikipedia, the GGS is “revered as a Guru, a sacred conduit for wisdom and guidance. Guru Gobind Singe (1666-1708), the tenth Guru in Sikh tradition, affirmed the sacred text ... as his successor, terminating the line of human Gurus. ... From that point on, the text remained not only the holy scripture of the Sikhs, but is also regarded by them as the living embodiment of their Ten Gugus.”

The book was a radical departure from traditional Hindu and Muslim faiths, espousing the equality of all people, regardless of caste, color, or sex and believing the existence of a single god.

Written between 1469 to 1708, the GGS contains precisely 1,430 pages of hymns about good and righteous living. Only the Sikh publishing house can print copies, and each is exactly like the original. Many Sikhs can’t afford to own one since it must be honored like royalty, having its own room and special accoutrements, including a throne and panoply.

The specter of catachresis, pronounced “kat-uh-KREE-sis” and defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as “the misapplication of a word or phrase,” crops up because the GGS is written in Gurmukhi, a writing system early Sikh leaders created from many languages, including Sanskrit, Persian and Hindi.  Catachresis and misuse of words brings poor Christopher Marlowe to mind. Shakespeare might have stayed in Avon had Marlowe’s brilliant way with words not launched the Elizabethan theatre to prominence in 1587 with his smash hit, “Tamburlaine.”

Besides being Shakespeare’s greatest predecessor, Marlowe was active in espionage, using misleading statements to ferret out atheists for Queen Elizabeth’s spymasters. “Atheist” in this sense is catachrestic, since Queen Elizabeth considered Catholics, alchemists and pretenders to the throne to be atheists.

There’s evidence of Marlowe’s use of catachresis to confuse and entrap, much like the woman who recently infiltrated gun control organizations for the National Rifle Association. It also probably brought on his death at age 29.

Marlowe was under suspicion several times, but always cleared by the Queen’s counselors. The final time, he was arrested on May 10, 1593, based upon some “heretical writings” he allegedly mixed in with an informer’s papers. On May 20, Marlowe was fatally stabbed above the eye during an all-day meeting with three men with connection to spying and the London underworld.

Rumors abounded that he was debauched at a tavern, but in 1925 a scholar discovered the original 1593 coroner’s report. It said Marlowe and the men spent the day quietly talking in a home owned by a woman with her own links to espionage.

Officially, Marlowe was killed in self-defense while fighting over a bar tab, but his treacherous use of misleading words was probably behind his demise.

“The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus” described a smarty-pants selling his soul to the devil and was Marlowe’s greatest literary achievement, with thousands of later writers, including Goethe, Lord Byron, Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Tolstoy and Tolkien using his plot. Sadly, no true copies of it exist, and the two earliest versions were drawn from actors’ memories or prompting books and were published years after his death.

Having huge hunks of the surviving “Faustus” obviously written by other, lesser writers and with his shaky reputation and early death, Marlowe has been eclipsed by Ben Johnson, Shakespeare and others. It’s also startling to learn how deadly precarious it was to say or even think certain thoughts back then, even privately.

Ah, catachresis! Shakespeare himself alluded to Marlowe’s fall and death in “As You Like It,” where a character states, “When a man’s verses cannot be understood ... it strikes a man more dead than a reckoning in a little room.”

Greg Hill is director of Fairbanks North Star Borough libraries.