Of Gods and Supermen

The word “God” is either derived from Old English, or in a divine accident of unintended punning, from Gothic “gott” which probably means “to invoke”. Yes, it’s origin is uncertain, and unverified.

More interestingly though, “God” has two rather common roots in Ancient Greek and Latin. In Greek, the root is “theo-“, and we get a lot of commonly used and relevant terms from it. A country run by religious leaders is a theocracy, an Instagram post on the etymology of the word is theocentric, and brownies that are so good that they’re heavenly are theobromic (“-brom” in Greek is literally food).

The King of Greek Gods is Zeus, and when the Romans pillaged their way through the Pantheon they picked up Zeus and pronounced it “Deus”. And that became Latin root for God, or “deity”. So if you find “dei” or “deux” written along with a bunch of other words, it’s probably got to do something with God. For example, “opus dei” is God’s work. Mozart was godly because his middle name was literally Amadeus (amare + deus or love + God).

If you’re being beat up by Batman and suddenly you decide to shout “MARTHA!” and boom everything is cool again, then you just employed a “deus ex machina”, or “God from a machine”. The phrase comes from Greek theatre where in a play, to solve a seemingly unsolvable problem, the author would introduce a plot device (usually God lowered down onto stage using a mechanism) which would solve the problem. And scene.