I was thinking to myself this morning, "TGIF." Then I wondered just why it is we call Friday "Friday" and not "Blogday" or "Squeekday" or the like. What to do? Why turn to the friendly Wikipedia, of course...
The name Friday comes from the Old English frigedæg, meaning the day of Frige, the Germanic goddess of beauty, with similar cognates existing in most Germanic languages. The word for Friday in most Romance languages is derived from the name of Venus (vendredi in French, venerdi in Italian, viernes in Spanish, vineri in Romanian etc.), while in Germanic languages it is named after Freya [pictured], the Norse goddess of love and fertility (Freitag in Modern German, vrijdag in Dutch, fredag in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish etc.).So it seems that Friday lives up to its name during happy hours across the globe (in alcohol-drinking cultures), when, with the more alcohol consumed, everyone turns into someone else's Frige, Freya, Venus or Adonis.
In India, Friday is Shukravar. It is based on Shukra—Vedic god of Venus.
2 comments:
And here's me thinking "vendredi" came from "vendre", "to sell", and meant something along the lines of "market day"....
No, "market day", as Iain Hewitson will tell you, is Wednesday, or mercredi as the French are wont to say. And without another posting on the etymology of Wednesday courtesy of those wacky pffolkes at Wikipedia, suffice it to say the Germanic and Romance names both originate as paeans to gods who guided souls to the underworld.
Anyone for the next episode of Dr Tongue's 3-D House of Boatmen of the River Styx?
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