Friday Fun Facts
Welcome to a new feature here on Messy Blessings – the Friday Fun Fact!
I hope to bring you a fun historical or etymological factoid every Friday that relates to the Catholic Church and how it has impacted our language, customs, education, and economics. So on to our first factoid!
The week we’ll start off easy – the word “holiday.” The idea of having a special day off to memorialize something is not itself an invention of the Catholic Church, but the church is the source of our current word for these days. The original Old English word was haligdaeg – literally “holy day”, which later morphed to “haliday” around the 12th century and changed again to our current pronunciation of holiday around the 14th century. The term was exclusive to Church holy days until sometime in the 16th century, when its usage became more divergent.
Have a great weekend!
Mike