Euphonium wrote: ↑Thu Dec 13, 2018 12:00 pm
Ugh. That no one got the Hadji Murad clue was disappointing--my Ph.D. dissertation focuses on popular religiosity and religious dissent in late imperial Russia, and Tolstoy is a significant part of that.
I don't know enough about his bio - I mean, anything - to have gone for that one. I blurted out Dostoe-Tolstoy at home
Why did so many go to Ecclesiastes? What am I missing there? I wrote down Lamentations and Psalms and crossed out Lamentations, without finding any etymological confirmation of Psalm
Unlikely winner today but she had a slow start, we'll see how she does on Wednesday (2 days ago)
To me, "Psalms" just seems Greek. Other languages don't begin words with a Ps- sound--at least not the languages I'm familiar with. Hebrew doesn't. But Greek has a letter of their alphabet devoted to that sound--psi (ψ). Lots of Greek words begin that way, as do many English words derived from the Greek. Words that start with psych- or pseudo- are the most common of these. Words that start with psalm- or psalt- bring up a respectable third. I didn't know the origin of the word "Psalms". But if you say it's a book of songs with a Greek-looking name, no other candidates come close.
For those who went with Ecclesiastes, that wasn't a terrible guess. The name is from the Greek. (The Hebrew name is Qohelet.) We use the ecclesia- root in English to refer to church-related things. Ecclesiastical is probably the most common of those words. Not that it's common, but you may have run across it.