Hallelujah! Today’s Word Odyssey topic is the origins of God. Well, not really the origins of God, but rather the word God. But even that is a complicated matter.

Let’s start with hallelujah. That means praise be to Yahweh, from Hebrew “hillel”, which is a song of praise, and Yahweh, the name of the god of the Israelites.

In the Old Testament book of Isaiah, Yahweh declares: "I am Yahweh, that is My name." Most of the time, Yahweh refers to the Hebrews’ own tribal god, not the god of everyone. He makes his status as numero uno in the pantheon of gods clear in the very first Commandment: “You shall have no other gods before me.” Due the various ways of translating and alphabetizing Hebrew, Yahweh is sometimes rendered as Jehovah, such as in the King James version of the Bible. But they’re the same Dude.
Early English translations of the Old Testament also frequently use Elohim to refer to God. But Elohim sometimes refers generically to the gods, like the gods of Egypt, yet sometimes substitutes for Yahweh.

You won’t find Yahweh, Jehovah or Elohim in modern English versions of the Bible. Yahweh and Jehovah have been scrubbed—not because of some diabolical scheme, but because of the sacred tetragrammaton. The what?! Because written Hebrew doesn’t use vowels, in Hebrew Yahweh is rendered as a four (tetra) letter (grammaton) word: YHWH. Yahweh (and, thus, Jehovah) eventually became regarded by Jews as too sacred to say, except on special occasions. In deference, later English Bible translations substituted “Lord” or “God”. For clarity (and consistency), Elohim is also now rendered as God or gods.

Allah is the Muslim word for God. But it’s also the word used by Arab Christians and Arab Jews to refer to God. That’s because the origin of Allah is Arabic. Before Mohammed, Arabs were polytheistic and allah referred to one of the gods, the Creator. When Mohammed founded Islam, Allah became the term for the one, all-powerful Supreme Being. The polytheistic origins, however, are still seen in the Islamic tradition that Allah has 99 names, each describing a different character trait.

If Allah sounds similar to Elohim, that’s not an accident. Al and El are the Arabic and Hebrew words for “the”. The Arabic root Ilah and the Hebrew root of Elohim are likely related. Adding “the” at the beginning is critical, because there is a world of difference between A god and THE God.

Now how about the word God itself? My book on Word Histories says it derives from a Germanic word meaning “sky-dweller.” But more reliable sources insist that it derives from a proto-Germanic word “gudo”, meaning to call or to invoke or to be worshipped. There’s reasonable conjecture that this word can be traced back to the proto-Indo-European language.

It’s interesting that as a Germanic word, “gudo” and “god” were gender-neutral. It became masculine under the influence of Christianity. God first appears capitalized in a Gothic translation of the Bible.

To be possessed by God was “gudigaz.” This evolved in Old English to “gidig”, while acquiring the connotation of possessed by God in a crazy way—that is, to be gidig meant you were mad as a hatter. By Middle English the meaning evolved so that it was used simply to describe someone who was foolish in a dizzy kind of way. That is, you are giddy, like a school girl with a crush.

We say the word God many times every day, usually without thinking about it. Once upon a time in English, it was fitting to bid farewell by saying “God be with ye”. As happens in language all the time, people shorten these kinds of phrases, so “God be with ye” was contracted to a simple goodbye. It’s not just English speakers that do this. The French bid “adieu” and the Spanish say “adios”, both of which are literally “to God”, which are shortened ways of commending the person to go with God.

Vaya con Dios!

I think we can all agree that children on planes can make or totally ruin your flight experience. There are those interesting occasions when you play janken (also known as rock, paper, scissors) with an adorable Japanese child while your plane is boarding. Breaking language barriers a game of ick-ack-ock at a time.

I’ll warn you up front that this column has neither rhyme nor reason. In fact, it’s much ado about nothing. But I don’t care, because the world's my oyster.

Some foolosopher once said that he didn’t care for that Shakespeare fella because his plays were just a bunch of clichés. Of course they’re full of clichés, because Shakespeare coined the phrases, and they’re so pithy that they’ve been endlessly repeated for the past four hundred years. So now many of them are clichés or, to use one of the several hundred phrases that Shakespeare invented—and which are still being employed today—they are household words. You might say that Shakespeare launched a sea change in the English language.

Today I’m going to get creepy. There are many words for creepy guys, probably for good reason. One of the all-time favorites is Peeping Tom. It’s a great story.

I was never good at Jenga, or anything that requires a steady hand. Caterpillar used the 320E, TH514C, 277D, M316D and 349E to play a monstrous game of Jenga. One crane operator on the ground directed five other Cat drivers while they maneuvered and reordered 27 massive wooden blocks one at a time.

I fly almost exclusively with Southwest Airlines. I don’t know if it’s because flights are cheap, bags fly free or that one time, they bumped me up to first class and the beautiful flight attendant got me drunk. I guess that was another airline, but I was so drunk I thought I was on a Southwest flight.

Here's a charming video of a Southwest flight attendant working a plane full of people while she disperses that helpful safety information over the hardly audible intercom. I think she would have got a standing ovation if all the passengers weren't buckled in.

She should take her act on the road.

A lot of books and blogs on etymology target odd words, many that you’ve never heard of, nor ever will again. These can be provocative. But for Word Odyssey, I prefer common, everyday words, words we take for granted, but which carry a rich history that is not commonly known. Now, there’s hardly an American English word more common than dollar. Day in and day out, dollars fly in and out of our wallets—mostly out, it seems. But what the heck is the origin of that word? The “doll” in dollar doesn’t sound like anything familiar, except a plastic toy baby, which wouldn’t be a likely candidate to have led to the ubiquitous unit of American currency. And the “ar” ending of dollar isn’t a very common suffix, either.

So what’s up with the dollar? Here’s the story…..

Yesterday, one of the most popular websites of the 2000s, HomestarRunner.com updated after more than three years of gathering dust.

The newest cartoon, posted on April 1, replaced the original intro video on the site — and more importantly, seems as if it's closing the book on the Homestar Runner series and characters. It delves into the site's history, playing long-forgotten features for laughs, sending a love-note to the fans of the wildly-popular Strong Bad E-Mails and closing with interplay between the site's two iconic characters.

The last screen, a call-back to the series's love of obsolete tech (have I mentioned that the site is entirely in Flash, a platform that's dying off faster than '80s pro wrestlers?) features download links for Windows 98 desktop themes and the ever-present end-screen Easter Eggs.

Ronald McDonalds all over the country are expressing their love for the Mexican fast food goliath. What a good play on words, Taco Bell. We can't wait for all the Wendys testimonials.

Shameless self-promotion alert! I will be a guest on the The World Famous Frank Show tomorrow at approximately 7:30 a.m. I will be discussing the Weekly's 100 Essential Dishes list with the fellas, and hopefully talking Frank out of the drive through bit.

If anyone is awake at that hour, considering the whole city will be celebrating our Sweet 16 Victory (or god forbid, drowning our sorrows of a loss), tune in and catch my ever so charming nervous sta-sta-stutter and constant stream of "umms" and "uhhs".

Go Cats!!!