WORSHIPPING WORDS

I recently stumbled across a word you all might like: epeolatry, meaning "the worship of words". It appears that it was first used in an 1860 collection of essays by American polymath Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (the father of the Supreme Court Justice), and Holmes coined the term from the Greek words epos, meaning "word", and -latry, meaning "worship of". Epos, which was like a more specific version of the word logos and is also the source of epic, comes from Proto-Indo-European wekw, meaning "to speak". Meanwhile, the suffix -latry, which is in a bunch of words but most notably shows up in idolatry, comes from Greek latreia, meaning "worship", and that's from latreus, meaning "servant". Finally, it's thought that latreus derives from Proto-Indo-European le, "to get".