The secular word HOLOCAUST: scholarly myths, history, and 20th ...

JON PETRIEburnt offering’; while the second de nition applies this sense of sacri ce in amore general fashion … Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary[’s] … rstde nition of ‘holocaust’ [is] ‘a sacri ce consumed by re.”’ 11 This statementevidences a serious misconception as to the rationale of the ordering ofde nitions in the Oxford English Dictionary and Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.In both, the rst de nition is the oldest known meaning, a meaning thattoday may be archaic or infrequently encountered. Generally, dictionariespublished before 1950, and contemporary updates of such dictionaries, do notindicate the frequency of use of different meanings of a word. However, twoAmerican dictionaries, one published in 1927 and the other in 1947, do indicatethat the most frequently used meaning of “holocaust” is “great destruction oflife” or “destructive re,” and not, as Garber and Zuckerman claim, “sacri ce”and “burnt offering.” 12 And a third dictionary, the Thorndike Century JuniorDictionary of 1942, which claims that its de nitions derive from an examinationof word usage in an extensive sampling of texts, gives no indication that“holocaust” has any religious meaning whatsoever: “holocaust: 1) completedestruction by re, especially of animals or human beings, 2) great or wholesaledestruction.”Possibly underlying some statements alleging religious overtones of“holocaust” by scholars who have not read Garber and Zuckerman is the“etymological fallacy,” the belief that a word’s original meaning forever conditionsthe “true” or “correct” sense of a word. Serious students of language havelong recognized that “the original sense of words is often driven out of use bytheir metaphorical acceptations” (Samuel Johnson), and thus etymologicalknowledge is often not an aid to understanding the meaning(s) or connotation(s)of a word. 13Perhaps a few examples are necessary to demonstrate the unreliability ofetymology as a guide to meaning. The rst meaning of “revolution” probablywas “astronomical motion that returns to the point of departure,” a meaning thatremains in current use. An early political “revolution,” the English Revolutionof 1688, was seen by many contemporaries as a felicitous return to the past, thereplacement of a Catholic absolutist king by a monarch similar to the Catholic’spredecessor in his Protestantism and respect for Parliament. 14 Today, “theRevolution” can refer to very different events, but events that almost invariablyare believed to constitute a radical break from some aspect of past practice ratherthan a return to a previous condition. Another brief word history: “halo” in earlyGreek referred to a “threshing oor.” From medieval times, a “halo” in Christianiconography symbolized sanctity. “Halo spot” today is the name of a diseaseaffecting oats and beans. “Catastrophe,” like “halo” and “holocaust,” comesfrom the Greek. Until the 19th century the principal meaning of “catastrophe”was the denouement of a play, a denouement that might be happy. Today,“Jewish catastrophe” as a referent to the Nazi mass murder of Jews is a readilyaccepted phrase despite “catastrophe” originally, and until fairly recently, referringto ctional events, ctional events that respectable audiences often applauded.36