Patriots

(piano music)

Hello, and welcome to Your Greek Word On A Sunday, a weekly, bite-size podcast for anyone curious on language, etymology and connections. I am your host, Emmanuela Lia and wherever you are in the world, if you want to entertain your brain for a few minutes, this is the podcast for you. Let's Go!

‘Remember remember the 5th of November…’ That’s how the rhyme goes in the UK. On November 5th 1605 a company of Catholic men was arrested for treason and hanged for attempting to blow up the House of Lords of the Protestant monarchy. The failure of The Gunpowder Plot as it’s known is celebrated to this day with bonfires and fireworks. Guy Fawkes one of the members of the plot, has been turned into an anti-establishment hero through movies and iconography but mainly, through a grave misunderstanding of history. He really was nothing more than a religious fanatic against a religiously fanatic monarchy. It's worth reading the story in full and understanding the behaviours of both religious groups at the time. Now, that misunderstanding leads us to an even older misunderstood word that is often assigned to guy Fawkes too. The word came to England through France in the 1600s and wasn’t always a pleasant term until Samuel Johnson put it in a dictionary, in 1755, cementing it as a virtue. Πατήρ (patir) in Ancient Greek and Πατέρας (pateras ) in modern means ‘father’. Πατρίδα (patrida) means ‘fatherland’. The ancient Greeks had city -states, Πόλεις (polis) so anyone who was a free citizen from the same city was a Συμπολίτης (sympolitis) unless they were a slave or a group of foreigners from another country entirely . They, were called ΠΑΤΡΙΩΤΕΣ/PATRIOTS

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