well, not the Holocaust. just one of many.
i was chuckling with a friend of mine the other day because a lot of the early 20th-century documents i'm currently working with were using extraordinarily over-the-top rhetoric to describe a series of fires that struck the pacific northwest in 1910. one word that kept popping up was "holocaust". now, we currently obviously associate this term with one specific incident, but in 1910, that wouldn't have been the case. so i decided to check up on what "holocaust" actually means.
my uninformed guess was something like "holy" + "fire", but it turns out (according to the OED), that "holocaust" is from Greek, made up of words for "whole" and "burnt". the first definition refers specifically to burnt offerings, and the third to something having been completely burnt (as if in an accident, for example). in that sense, the lowercase "holocaust" completely makes sense in the context of the 1910 documents. if anything, it makes less sense in its 1940s context now.
either way, interesting to see how a meaning a word changes over time.
words are fun! learning about holocausts is fun!
1 comments:
I would just like to point out that the same root brings us holistic and caustic.
I think the case for the Jewish holocaust is reasonable. If holocaust means "wholly burnt", that's very akin to "completely destroyed" or "wiped off the face of the earth" which is the entire idea behind genocide. And, in an ironic turn of phrase and history, many Jews were cremated alive.
Besides, metaphor and hyperbole have been the distortion and wah pedal of writers for many, many years. Case in point. lol
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