After Trump made a blasphemous post depicting himself as Jesus, even some of his supporters aren’t buying the official excuse that it was simply a banal misunderstanding, instead blaming him for making a malicious dig at the Pope who criticized him, and etymologically that’s appropriate. Blasphemy came into English in the early 13th c. from Old French blasfemie “blasphemy”, through Late Latin blasphemia, ultimately from Greek blasphemia “profane speech; slander”, from the verb form blasphemein “to speak profanities; to slander; to speak impiously”. The second element there, Greek pheme “utterance”, can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root *bha- “to speak”, which also came into the Germanic branch producing Proto-Germanic *bannan “to speak publicly (used of particular kinds of proclamation in feudal or prefeudal custom; ‘to proclaim under penalty, summon to the levy, declare outlaw’)”, which not only produced Old English bannan and Modern English ban, but was also borrowed into Old French as ban “feudal jurisdiction, summons to military service, proclamation” and banel “communal”, becoming Modern French banal “belonging to a manor; common, hackneyed, commonplace” and borrowed into English in the 1840s. The origin of the first element of blasphemy is uncertain, but the entire word has been plausibly reconstructed as PIE *mls-bha-mo- “speaking evil” with *ml-s- “evil” representing a suffixed zero-grade form of the root *mel- “false, bad, wrong”, which also produced the Latin adjective malus “bad” and the noun form malitia “ill-will, spite, malice”, becoming Old French and later English malice. Blaspheme and blame are in fact basically the same word, with Late Latin blasphemare “to blaspheme, to speak lightly or amiss of God or sacred things” producing the Vulgar Latin form blastemare, which became Old French blasmer “to rebuke, reprimand, condemn, criticize” (with the Modern French form blâmer), borrowed into English as blame.
The #ConnectedAtBirth #etymology of the week is BLASPHEMY/BLAME/MALICIOUS/BANAL #wotd #blasphemy #blame #malicious #banal #Trump #Pope #Jesus
