My Heavens!

I used the word nirvana a few weeks ago. Nirvana often is capitalized, and needs to be when used to talk about the Buddhist state of freedom from the cycle of personal reincarnations. In Hinduism it is salvation through the union of Atman with Brahma. Its use in English has broadened to refer to any state of bliss.  It has only been used in English since 1836, coming from the Sanskrit where it means disappearance or literally “to blow out, a blowing out” (as a flame might). It was not until 1895 that its sense broadened to the state of perfection.

Nirvana is not the same thing as heaven, the place where God and the angels reside and to which Christians aspire to live in eternity. Heaven is the English word for the home of God, having come from the Old English word heofon. Prior to being God’s home it was simply the sky, and is still used in that sense today. (If you’re wondering how there can be more than one sky, etymonline states that the plural use, skies, “is probably from Ptolemaic theory of space composed of many spheres, but it also formerly was used in the same sense as the singular in Biblical language, as a translation of [the] Hebrew plural shamayim.”)

Heaven-sent has been used since the 1640s, “heavens to Betsy” first appeared in print in 1892 and may refer to Davy Crockett’s rifle “Betsy.” That still doesn't make sense, but it's the best explanation I could find. “Heavens to Murgatroyd,” for you Snagglepuss fans, was first uttered in a 1944 movie before Snagglepuss adopted it. It may have been inspired by the Murgatroyd family in Gilbert and Sullivan’s opera “Ruddigore.” Several members of the line of Murgatroyd barons were ghosts having been cursed by a witch. I suspect these uses  of heaven (and others like “My Heavens”) came into being as a Christian response to the use of the word “Hell” as a curse word.

Before we leave this idyllic topic, let’s go to paradise. One meaning for the word is a synonym for heaven; another use is as the intermediate place where souls wait for the final resurrection of the dead at judgment. It has since the late 1100s referred to the Garden of Eden, and came through Old French, where it was paradis. The French got it from the Latin word paradisus, which came from the Greek paradeisos, which means park when not referring to the Garden of Eden. According to etymonline.com “The Greek word, originally used for an orchard or hunting park in Persia, was used in [the] Septuagint to mean ‘Garden of Eden,’ and in New Testament translations of Luke xxiii:43 to mean ‘heaven’ (a sense attested in English from c. 1200). “

Shangri La has been used as a term for an earthly paradise since 1938. It originated in English in James Hilton’s 1933 novel “Lost Horizon,” which was made into a popular film in 1937. Hilton used Shangri La as the name of a Tibetan utopia.

Utopia first appeared in 1516 as the title of Thomas More’s book about an imaginary island with perfect legal, social and political systems. (Like Francis Bacon’s 1627 novel New Atlantis, parodied by Jonathan Swift in Gulliver’s Travels.) Utopia was formed by combining the Greek “ou” that means “not” with “topos” that means “place.” By 1610 it broadened to mean any perfect place. Don’t be fooled into thinking it comes from the Greek word for good, eu- (as in euphoria). It literally means nowhere.

Now back to the real world.