PRINCE
Wild Word Friday!
A few years also, a friend of mine attended her granddaughter’s kindergarten graduation. During the ceremony, each child had a mini interview. The question asked was “What do you want to be when you grow up.” My friend’s granddaughter answered, “A princess,” which made the audience laugh and the girl’s mother groan. Every little girl who heard that interview answer said the same thing, and who can disagree? Princesses and princes are in vogue nowadays, and for the past couple of weeks, world news has been dominated by all things royal.
Whether or not that’s your interest area, I thought we could look into the background of a word we’ve heard often in the past couple of weeks – PRINCE.
Most western European languages, including English, derive the word PRINCE from the Latin princeps, which means first or chief. We can see a great deal of similarity in the Italian principe, the Danish, Dutch and Swedish prins, the Middle English prince and the Middle High German, prinze.
The Welsh word for PRINCE is tyweysog, which has a more accurate translation of leader.
It seems to me that most of us have a need to exalt our leaders, which is probably why I do so enjoy watching (for a little while) broadcasts like those which covered William and Kate’s royal wedding. May God bless their life together.
However, my family history is one of staunch rebellion against strong-armed monarchies and/or dictatorships, so that may be the reason that I’m also relieved that I live in a democracy. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “God must love the common man, he made so many of them.”
Q4U: Have you ever wished you were a member of the royalty? (Do you want to be a prince or princess when you grow up?)
Blessings!
Sue
Beautifully put, Laura. Sometimes we just need to get caught up in dreams!
We have a history of witch burning in our country, too, back in the 1600s. What a terrible and evil practice. I always wonder why we humans turn our backs on loving and caring.
I remember, when I was about 9, the teacher asked each one of us in the class what we wanted to be when we grow up. I answered: a whitch….. everybody laughed and I got teased for a long long time by my classmates.
I remember being very confused about it because what I ment was that I wanted to do good, make potions and heal people. (in that same year, in history lessons, we learnt about the whitches in Holland, how they did good but the people didn’t trust them and burned them.It is an interesting bit of history in Holland, still told today and you can still see the weighing scales where the witches were weighed, if they were under a certain weight they were drowned, if they were over a certain weight they were burned )
Can’t say I ever wished to be a member of the royal family. I’ve written about people who wished they were so maybe down deep there is this hidden wish. As for Kate and William’s wedding I saw little bits but didn’t feel the need to watch very much of it. I do still think that in one sense it was nice to have so many people caught up in it. With so many horrible things going on in the world we all need to take a break and become caught up in a dream or two from time to time.