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This is crazy. As I was trawling online etymology forums, I came across the peculiar history of Lucifer. In the beginning, there was nothing (haha), until the Romans went along and invented the word lux, meaning "light", with a conjugated form luc. The Romans built upon that word by tacking on the suffix -fer, meaning "bringing". So lucifer originally referred to "light-bringing", or as it came to be used, "morning star" or "light on the horizon". This Satanic word originally meant something good, completely opposite from its current definition. However, when people decided to make the Bible, the Lord says in Isaiah 14:12 "How you have fallen from heaven, lucifer, son of the dawn!" Thus, Lucifer became sort of a proper noun and came to refer to fallen angels. At that point, it was only a skip, a hop, and a jump until the ultimate transition was made from "corrupt angel" to "the ultimate opposing force against God", with Lucifer's present-day synonyms including very nasty words like "the Devil", "Satan", and "Beelzebub", which shouldn't be associated with "light-bringer", but sadly they are.
2 Comments
Shanti
6/29/2018 09:33:37 am
I don't know Hebrew, but I've read that the original, "helel ben shahar", roughly "The shining one, son of the dawn", referred to a Babylonian king's name and presumably his father's name, not even to an angel. Then, of course, helel was translated from Hebrew to Latin as Lucifer, because the morning star (now known to be Venus) would logically be the sun of dawn.
Naati
4/10/2019 12:09:52 am
You sir are 100% correct Leave a Reply. |
AUTHOR
Adam Aleksic, a freshman studying linguistics and government at Harvard University, has been described as the internet's sixth most famous etymologist. He also has disturbing interests in words, vexillology, geography, board games, limericks, and law.
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