Religion in Modern Language: Part Two

Written by Blackkdark on 28th March 2007

Modern language has a lot of old religion in it.  Because religion has played such an important part of history, many terms have become an important part of our language.

There are a lot of things which are used as exclamations.  One of the most common that I hear in my region of America is "Oh my God."  Similar things can be heard in German (Oh Gott! - Oh God!) and Spanish (Dios mío! - my god!).  Many other phrases exist in many languages that are like that.  In English a good amount of them have more harmless equivalents.  Words and phrases like, "Geez," (or Jeez) "oh my gosh," and even "by George," are forms of "Jesus," "oh my God" and originally "by St. George."

The culture of the people also affects how religion will affect the language.  Areas which are well known to have a lot of religious loyalty historically will more likely have more religious terms in the language.  Spanish and Spanish speaking countries have a lot of swearing terms which are rooted in religion.  Ireland puts more severity on phrases like "Mary, mother of Jesus," amongst others.  In Hebrew and Yiddish, the people don't write the whole word for God out (sometimes we can see g*d), for respect of him.

There are also a lot of words which have been influenced by the old gods.  Note that the planets and many star forms were named after the Roman gods.  That might also have to do with the fact that the Romans and Greeks wrote extensively about the heavens.

I personally have no religion and try to step outside the box when it comes to looking at phrases which came from religious origins. 

Polish

Submitted by Ender on Fri, 08/06/2007 - 11:07.

It's the same in Polish, we use "O mój Boże"(oh my god) and "Jezus, Maryja" (Jesus, Mary).

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