Facts about the words Xmas and Holiday

Solly Mack

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Sun Dec-04-05 05:12 AM
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Facts about the words Xmas and Holiday

Xmas – pronounced exactly the same as Christmas.
http://www.bartleby.com/61/80/X0008000.html

"But people unaware of the Greek origin of this X often mistakenly interpret Xmas as an informal shortening pronounced (eksms). "

X has stood for Christ since about first century CE / e.v. - or AD, if you prefer.

From askOxford:

http://www.askoxford.com/results/?view=dict&field-12668446=Xmas&branch=13842570&textsearchtype=exact&sortorder=score%2Cname

If you have an Oxford dictionary at home, look it up. It goes into more details about the word, it's origins, how long it's been around and the FACT that the X does mean Christ.

So saying "Merry Xmas" in NO way removes Christ from anything.

From the words of an Evangelical - Dr Raymond Cox:

Fact sheet on Cox
http://www.geocities.com/ruinum/factsht.htm

What he said about Xmas:

http://www.geocities.com/ruinum/vsxmas.htm

“Xmas is not of modern coinage. The Oxford English Dictionary documents the use of this abbreviation back to 1551. Undoubtedly it was employed before that. Now 1551 is fifty years before the first English colonists came to America and sixty years earlier than the completion of the King James Version of the Bible! Moreover, at the same time, Xian and Xianity were in frequent use as abbreviations of Christian and Christianity.

You see, the X in Xmas did not originate as our English alphabet's X but as the symbol X in the Greek alphabet, called Chi, with a hard ch. The Greek Chi or X is the first letter in the Greek word Christos. Eric G. Gration claims that as early as the first century the X was used as Christ's initial. Certainly through church history we can trace this usage. In many manuscripts of the New Testament, X abbreviates Christos (Xristos). In ancient Christian art X and XR (Chi Ro--the first two letters in Greek of Christos abbreviate his name. We find that this practice entered the Old English language as early as AD 100. Moreover, Wycliff and other devout believers used X as an abbreviation for Christ. Were they trying to take Christ away and substitute an unknown quantity? The idea is preposterous.”

Now, for the word "holiday" - based on the English words, "holy" and "day" - the word "holiday" was used to mark special days on the church (but not just the church) calendar ...so "Happy Holidays" means Happy HOLY days.

Holiday \Hol"i*day\, n.
1. A consecrated day; religious anniversary; a day set apart
in honor of some person, or in commemoration of some
event. See Holyday.

http://dict.die.net/holiday/

Just because the word expanded to include other meanings and usages does not change the words origin: holy + day.(holiday-vacation, holiday-any national or legal "holiday" recognized by a country)

Christmas doesn't happen to be the ONLY holy day during this time of the year - so wishing all religious people a Happy Holy Day is just the decent/polite thing to do.

But then decent and polite isn't exactly a Falwell-like trait, is it?
Falwell is either ignorant of his own religion or he is nothing but a lying ,loud-mouth blowhard who just wants to stir up shit.

I suspect it's both.