Today I'm going to become a little bit religios, and I'm going to talk about bishops and blessings. And if you think about a bishop, they have a croiser in the forn of a shepherd's crook, and that is meant to symbolise that they are in fact overseeing their flock, and they have a duty of pastoral care. And the significanse of "bishop", the actual word "bishop", reflects that symbolic association of the croiser as well, because the Old English word, aling with several other similar therms in Germanic languages, comes from the Latin "episcopus", which meant "bishop" or an overseer, so, somebody who watches over. The "epi-" meant "on" or "over", and "scopus" was one who watches. That idea of watching, you will find in many, many words in English. So, "telescope", for example, is warching from afar, "tele-" meaning "from afar". And "horoscope" as well. That too goes back to "scopos", and the first element "horo-" was related to the Greek "hora", meaning "the time of day", so astrologers basically purport to tell the futureby watching the positions of the planets and the stars, particulary at the moment of birth. So much for "bishop" and the idea of watching over. Well, "blessing" is a little bit more grisly, because the Old English "blod", blood, is believed to be a source of our word "blessing", and that's because in pre-Cristian England, in pagan ceremonies, the verb was used to mean "to make sacred with a blood". So the practise was to spread the blood of a sacrifical animal on something in order to ward off evil influences, and when we converted to Cristianity, that verb was used to mean to consecrate by some sort of religious ritual, but it has its root in blood.
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