Discussion Groups / British English / February 2008

19:40, lunedì 21 gennaio 2008, Matti Lamprhey:

The first two words were used to name Rolls Royce cars.
There was also a Lotus Spirit, if I remember correctly.

"Ghost" is an archaic equivalent of "soul" or "spirit", as in the phrase
"to give up the ghost", used (mostly) jocularly for to die. When the
King James Bible was still in common use, the title used of the third
member of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost, led to much misapprehension among
schoolchildren. The meaning is now mostly confined to revenants.

JS

The first poster however was still mistaken in
assuming there was any "odd one out".

Moving into a Tolkein-esque reading of the words
were Wraiths, as in the Ring Wraiths, ever but
wraiths? Or were they, too, the intangible essences
of once-living but now dead life?

If so then no fair treatment of the subject would
omit "Wights", after which I surmise the Isle of
Wight is named and presumed the most haunted place
in Britain. As its Latin name was "Ventnor" there
is no obvious link to Lingua Romanes.

Otherwise to claim the "spirit" is the part which
goes to heaven and this is somehow unique and part
of the essence of the word itself is to ignore basic
tenets of Orthodox Exorcism--which seek to free
trapped tortured souls into Salvation as well as
bind Demons identified via a match-book or grammar
(where Spiritualism is concerned) and other such
nasty hellish creaures and despatch them back off
to the realms of interminable tedium in the form
of menial mind-numbing unrewarding labour for eternity.

Sprites were generally considered benevolent, IIRC
but are still distinct from Spirits. The concept of
the Holy Ghost is likely to be hung over from the
days of syncretism with Germanic peoples, and as
such its inclusion in the King James (Authorised
Version) should come as no surprise, although
obviously the islands of the Faroese were bigger
back then, in 1066 and all that.

Ghouls seems also to have been omitted from this
list.

As far as I'm aware - and no I haven't checked -
soul was at one point identical to sole, again in
the non-Roman, non-podiatric, sense of the word,
and means the indivisible essence of an individual
after all the concepts of "zeitgeist" and Holy Ghost
are of self-similarity manifest across populations
rather than anything so intuitive as individuality.

G DAEB
COPYRIGHT (C) 2008 SIPSTON
--

How on earth could these words possibly

Look behind you......

Ghosts etc. might not exist, but they make for good stories. I recommend
that you read some of M.R. James' stories. This is a good one:
http://www.fadl12200.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/mrjframes.html.

JS

At 06:58:55 on Mon, 28 Jan 2008, Paul <paulmathewmac@gmail.com> wrote in
<5b7900aa-b9ad-42e7-a7c1-bdda0257cf8c@v17g2000hsa.googlegroups.com>:

You've got the wrong person, I think - in normal newsgroup postings I
have never used X-No-Archive, and never would - no more than I would
conceal my real name.  I stand by what I write, for good or ill, and I
always have.

[When I was a member of UKVoting, of course the Calls for Votes which I
prepared included X-No-Archive headers, otherwise (*sigh*) users of
GoogleGroups would find them and try to vote, months or even years after
the vote had closed.]

But thank you for the compliment, if it was indeed directed towards me,
and not to somebody who is using XNA.