Except it goes after the verb, not before. I don’t know why not, sorry – maybe because ‘an anathema’ is a bit of a tongue twister? Oh, and because English is wonderfully illogical and confusing, anathema is also an adjective, as we can use it to describe a noun e.g. Interestingly (maybe), ‘anathema’ is one of the few nouns we use without an article i.e. At some point (the internet doesn’t seem to know when or why), it changed to mean something bad or cursed (see also previous word of the week ‘ egregious’, which now means the total opposite of what it did originally). I realise this doesn’t sound like the opposite of eternal damning, but the being-up-high-ness meant it was closer to god/the gods/your deity of choice. Weirdly, the Greek root actually means the opposite – it literally means ‘placed on high, suspended, set aside’. The etymologyĪs per usual, we nicked the word ‘anathema’ from Latin which itself nicked it from Greek. Ain’t no Hail Marys gonna get you out of that one. Which is a fancy way of saying the top Catholic dude is sending you straight to the hot place downstairs (can you tell I went to convent school?). An anathema is also a ‘formal curse by a pope or a council of the Church, excommunicating a person or denouncing a doctrine’. But it has a second, less well-known (to me at least) meaning which plays into the story of ‘Good Omens’ (and which I’m sure Messrs Pratchett and Gaiman were well aware of). As in ‘people who say “could of” instead of “could have” are anathema to Emma’.
The meaning of ‘anathema’ that you’re probably familiar with is ’something or someone that one vehemently dislikes’. But my favourite is Anathema Device – so her first name gets the dubious honour of being my word of the week. There are lots of imaginatively named characters in ‘Good Omens’, including Newton Pulsifer, Agnes Nutter and Sister Mary Loquacious of the Chattering Order of St Beryl. It’s based on a book by the late great Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, my second-favourite author (a title I’m sure he’d appreciate). This week I’ve been bingeing* on the TV show ‘Good Omens’, a story of angels and demons, Armageddon and the Antichrist (with jokes).
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