I have taken, this
season, to wishing everybody a Merry Pandeismus -- as
Pandeismus sounds vaguely like
Christmas, but is in fact simply
German for
Pandeism.
The
coincidence in sound here is, by
confession, a product of
vocabulary engineering, and not one of those fantastic
coincidences of similiarity. Like, for example, that we go in life from
womb to
tomb, and yet the
rhyme of those words is entirely coincidental (
womb coming from Old English
wamb, meaning "
belly" or "
uterus"; and
tomb coming from the
Greek tymbos -- "
burial mound" or "
grave." Their
pronunciation evolved independently over time to what they are
today, their current coinciding
phoneme being but a
quirk of English
phonology.
But I digress. And not by
accident.
Digression is 4/5 of
adventure -- conceptually, but not linguistically, not in the sense that
anger is 5/6 of
danger; with
danger coming from the Old French
dangier, meaning "
power,
control, or
authority" (because what is more dangerous than these things) and ultimately from the
Latin dominium ("
ownership" or "control"), whilst
anger comes from the Old Norse
angr (which sounds very Norse), meaning "
distress,
grief, or
sorrow," related to the Proto-Germanic root
anguz (describing something tight or narrow). The overlap in their spellings is due solely to English's voraciousness in absorbing and adapting words from various languages, including French and Norse and Latin and German.
Pandeism itself is, naturally, (to quote
Wikipedia): "a hybrid blend of the root words
pantheism and
deism (Ancient Greek: πᾶν, romanized: pan, lit. 'all' and Latin: deus 'god')," and happens itself to have originated in German (as
Pandeismus before making its way into English in the usual
omnivorous way.
In
retrospect, it is fascinating how the English language so readily plucks words from other languages in much the same way that certain religions might pluck from
Paganism a
Solstice holiday,
stealing it away for one of their own holy days, arbitrarily associating it with a life event of a holy figure who, historically, was probably actually himself misinterpreted when trying to explain the principles of Pandeism to his own followers.... And so, to return to the initial premise, a Very Merry Pandeismus to
All, and especially a Very Merry Pandeismus to
You!!