Talking about some secretive words today. 😉
In one of our family devotionals last week, there was a quote from a “mystic” of millennia past, and we found ourselves wondering where the word came from.
Mystic comes from the Greek mystikos, meaning “secret, connected to the mysteries.” Sometimes today I hear any ancient scholar deemed a mystic being occult . . . but that connotation didn’t come around until 1610, long after the word was applied to those who spoke or wrote about the mysteries of God–which surely we can’t claim aren’t mysterious!
What I found really interesting is that secretary actually has very similar roots–how did I never really notice that it has SECRET right there in the first part of the work? LOL. A secretary has pretty much always meant “one who is entrusted with secrets,” and it migrated quite naturally from these trusted officials who knew the innermost, most secretive things of kings and dignitaries to those in the closest, trusted positions of anyone in authority.
Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.