More on Season's Greetings

The good news today is that we were supposed to get 3-5 inches of snow that just never developed. Less good news is that I'm coming up on a deadline at work, so I don't have as much time to spend writing here as I'd like. But I did see what seems in retrospect a fairly obvious take on this whole Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays deal. A column in today's Chicago Tribune takes a look at the etymologies of the words.

While the religious roots of "Christmas" are transparent -- the word began as a compound of "Christ's mass" -- it's less obvious [not that much less--Doug] that the word "holiday" has the word "holy" in it, as in "holy-day." It began in Old English as two words, "halig daeg" ("holy day") that were combined into one as early as 1,000 years ago, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

So it's all religious. Both sides of the "war" (though I've only been able to identify one side so far) are wishing others a happy (or merry) religious day. Or are they?

"Christmas," too, may soon (or already) function as a generic name--not to mention a commercial name for this season of spending--more than as a religious name, Pullum suggests." There is no hope of ever disguising the fact that the United States celebrates Christmas as a period of time off from work, exchanging of gifts, and rituals involving holly, ivy, mistletoe . . . tinsel, gifts, and a jolly white-bearded fat man wearing red," [Geoffrey] Pullum, [linguist and visiting scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University] writes, adding, "And yes, for some people, a commemoration of the birth of a religious leader in Bethlehem."

Does Bill O'Reilly know about this?