Word of the Week – Ghost

Word of the Week – Ghost

by | Oct 25, 2021 | Holidays, Word of the Week

It’s October! So I thought it would be fun to take a look at some of the words you’re going to be encountering in this season. Whether you celebrate Halloween or just the harvest (or nothing at all), I think you’ll agree that the etymologies this month are interesting!

Ghost…Our modern English word comes from Old English gast, which meant “breath; good or bad spirit, angel, demon; person, man, human being.” Though the origins are a bit murky, it’s thought that gast, along with similar words in other Germanic languages, is from the ancient root gheis, which is used to form all sorts of words that convey excitement, fear, or amazement.

Early English translations of the Bible chose to use the word Ghost to render spiritus, the Latin word used to describe not only the soul but the Holy Spirit. So Holy Ghost is one of the few surviving phrases that use ghost in that particular way. Otherwise, the notion of “the disembodied spirit of a deceased person” is the more original sense of the word and has been its primary meaning since the 14th century. It’s certainly interesting to note in that Old English gast, though, that it could be used to describe so many things that go beyond the corporeal.

It’s also interesting to note that in most Indo-European languages, the same words are used to describe both the human spirit and supernatural elements. So whether or not you believe in ghosts that haunt a place, the word is actually linked firmly to the human soul or spirit…and I daresay you DO believe in that! Which I will be considering more fully the next time someone asks if I believe in ghosts. 😉 How about you? Where do you come down on the question?

Word of the Week – Demon

Word of the Week – Demon

by | Oct 18, 2021 | Holidays, Word of the Week

We’re continuing our October look into spooky words today…with demon. I don’t know about you, but for me, this word conjures up a WHOLE different level of fear. Ghosts and spooks are words assigned to human spirits, but demon…that’s a whole different supernatural level, and one that invokes evil.

Right?

Um…well…if we’re looking at the history of the word, it actually isn’t so cut and dry!

The English word demon, which dates from 1200 as “an evil spirit, a malignant supernatural being, a devil” is taken directly from the Latin and Greek daemon, which means ANY spirit, good or bad, and sometimes used to describe human souls as well. So how did the English come to associate it solely with the evil side?

It’s because the Greek daemon is the word used in the Bible for “unclean spirits,” and Jewish authors also used it in Greek versions of the Old Testament books for “false gods.” Though Greek speakers never would have ONLY used it in this sense…we weren’t Greek speakers, LOL. So demon came to be applied solely to the evil side of the supernatural.

Occasionally writers or academics will want to use the word in the original Greek or Latin sense, especially when translating, so will interject that extra ‘a’ into the word and make it daemon to differentiate.

Word of the Week – Spooky

Word of the Week – Spooky

by | Oct 11, 2021 | Holidays, Word of the Week

It’s October! So I thought it would be fun to take a look at some of the words you’re going to be encountering in this season. Whether you celebrate Halloween or just the harvest (or nothing at all), I think you’ll agree that the etymologies this month are interesting!

Today we’re taking a look at spooky . . . which means really, we’re taking a look at spook, since that’s what it’s a form of. Spook dates from 1801 and is taken from the Germanic. The fun thing is that pretty much all Germanic languages have a work very similar to spook, but the meanings include not only the primary “ghost,” but also, “scarecrow” and “joke.”

In 1942 it began to be applied to spies–presumably because of their abilities to appear and vanish again.

Word of the Week – Galaxy

Word of the Week – Galaxy

by | Sep 27, 2021 | Word of the Week

Did you know that galaxy is from the Greek word for milk? I didn’t! Given that our galaxy is the Milky Way though, I wasn’t terribly surprised. The original Greek phrase was in fact galaxias kyklos, meaning “milky circle.” The term made its way into Latin, and from Latin to French, and from French to English by the 14th century.

By the mid 1800s, the term had become a bit more technical, meaning “the discrete stellar aggregate including the sun and all visible stars” rather than just “that milky white conglomerate up in the sky.” Around that same time, astronomers began to wonder if some of the things they could see through telescopes were in fact other galaxies…but it wasn’t until the 1920s that telescopes became powerful enough for them to be certain of it. So galaxy and Milky Way were interchangeable pretty much up until then.

I’ve always loved studying the night sky, though I am faaaarrrr from an expert. How about you? Do you enjoy astronomy?

Word of the Week – Utopia

Word of the Week – Utopia

by | Sep 20, 2021 | Word of the Week

I daresay we all know what I mean when I say the word Utopia, right. It’s a perfect society. We all know it’s pretty much mythical, much like the one Socrates outlines in “The Republic.” And we probably also know the word was coined by Thomas Moore when he wrote a book with that title.

But did you know that he chose that title and name for his society based on the Greek word for “nowhere”? I didn’t! That makes it really cool though, doesn’t it? That even in its name, we recognize that it does not–and cannot–exist. He wrote, and hence coined the term for, Utopia in 1516, and it’s been a part of the English language to describe an ideal society since 1551.

What’s really interesting though is that many people didn’t understand the rather complicated Greek idiom that led to this word (I won’t get into it here) and thought that instead of meaning “nowhere” or “no place,” it was based on the Greek eu, meaning “good,” and that the word meant “good place.” Incorrect…but compelling enough that it’s why people created the word dystopian to be its supposed opposite!

Have you ever read Utopia? I haven’t yet, but my husband’s reading it now…

Word of the Week – Parable and Parabola

Word of the Week – Parable and Parabola

by | Sep 13, 2021 | Word of the Week

Did you ever pause to consider that parable and parabola come from the same root? I don’t think I’ve ever really thought about it, until my husband brought it up the other day. He was talking about parables and used the adjective parabolic to describe it…and then paused and said, “Huh, that’s usually just used in the mathematical sense, but I bet parable and parabola are actually related, don’t you think?” I did! And they are.

Both words are from the Greek parabolē, which means “a comparison,” literally “a throwing beside” or “a juxtaposition.” The word moved from Greek to Latin and hence down the line into the Latinate languages. Interestingly, common (vulgar) Latin even adopted it to mean “word,” which is where we ultimately get parler in French for “to speak.” In English, the word parable has been used to describe stories with a lesson since the 1200s.

Now parabola, the mathematical term used to describe the open bell-like curve formed when a plane cuts through a cone on an angle parallel to one side. It was named by Apollonius in 210 BC, but at the time it was the same Greek word used for the stories, since it was a juxtaposition, a throwing beside of a plane and a cone. Keeping in mind that mathematical terms were still presented in their original Greek and Latin for quite a lot of modern history, it’s not then surprising that our English word parabola–spelled with a different ending to differentiate it from the “story” meaning–dates only to the 1570s. The concept is of course far older, but the date is for the word itself as an English word.

As for parabolic, it was actually used to mean “figurative, pertaining to a parable” from the mid-1500s and didn’t get applied to the mathematical shape until the 1700s. So totally fine to use that one either way. 😉

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