First Call for Paradise

It wasn’t always heaven

We all know about paradise, right? It’s the best place, where we want to go and be.

Get yourself in a spot that feels oh so good, and you might say, “Wow, this is paradise.”

Choose your synonym:

Maybe the real paradise is eternal, but the word isn’t. Old English didn’t have it, but the word did show up in England around 1200, a hundred-plus years after the Norman invasion of 1066. Spelling being rather flexible then, sometimes it was paradise and sometimes just paradis.

The latter spelling came from Old French, the language the Normans brought to Britain.

Since Latin — that dead language — was still the common and most respected language of Europe’s upper crust in those days, church fathers and other learned English people who thought highly of Latin liked to borrow from the old language to enrich the English vocabulary. English of those days may have been useful in everyday life, but it was hardly revered.

And what did these learned people find in Latin relative to paradise?

To be correct, it was Late Latin by then, and what they turned up was paradīsus. The motherlode. All in all, the word paradise seemed ready made for Christian followers. Heaven? Paradise? It was almost hand in glove.

The story of paradise doesn’t end, or begin, with Latin. You guessed it. Before that, there was Greek. Latin had its paradīsus, but it was built on the Greek parádeisos.

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