I am still not recovering from the procedure of yesterday….the thing put my boney butt down….so I think I will lay low today and try my best to bounce back…..I am a walking zombie (no pun intended) so I will take it easy one more day.

Happy Halloween!

I guess I should post something spooky since it is All Hallow’s Eve…..

How about one of my now famous question?

You know I cannot resist a little whimsy or for that matter a little history.

One person will called it a ‘cemetery’ and another person will call it a ‘graveyard’….which is correct?

Eventually, we’re all going to end up in a graveyard. Or is that a cemetery? What’s the difference, anyway?

These days, the answer is “not much.” Both are places where we bury the dearly departed, and the words are often used interchangeably. But that hasn’t always been the case—in fact, the words’ meanings have sort of flip-flopped.

Cemetery is the older of the two words; it’s derived from the Latin coemētērium and first appeared in the mid-1400s. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), it “Originally applied to the Roman underground cemeteries or catacombs,” or galleries with tombs for bodies along the sides. The first known use from J. Capgrave’s Abbreuiacion of Cronicles, is just barely legible today: “Anicetus … was biried in the cymytery of Kalixt.”

Over time, the meaning of cemetery shifted from the underground catacombs to burial grounds closer to the surface, and by 1485, it had come to refer to the consecrated ground next to a church, a.k.a. a churchyard (a usage that, per the OED, is now obsolete). Since the 1600s, cemetery has referred to a more general burial ground, particularly “a large public park or ground laid out expressly for the interment of the dead, and not being the ‘yard’ of any church,” according to the OED. Think of places like Paris’s Pere Lachaise or Brooklyn’s Green-wood Cemetery, which were both planned with the express purpose of serving as burial grounds for large amounts of people, no matter their religious inclination.

Graveyard is a newer word, and was initially a much more religiously neutral one: When it first popped up in English in the mid-1700s, it simply meant “a burial ground.” The OED pinpoints 1767 as its first use, when it appeared in P. V. Fithian’s  Journal & Letters: “He meant it for a Satire upon the neglect of the people in suffering their Grave-Yard to lie common.”

While “burial ground” remains the OED’s sole meaning for graveyard, other sources—including some funeral providers, Dictionary.com, and the Huffington Post—say that these days, the word refers to smaller burial areas near churches. As Titan Casket puts it, “Graveyards are often associated with churches and are thus always located on church grounds. Owing to land limitations, graveyards tend to be smaller in size, and are, therefore, more challenging to secure. In most cases, graveyards only allow members of the same religion, and more specifically, the same church, to be buried on their premises.”

https://www.mentalfloss.com/posts/graveyard-vs-cemetery

I know you guys were dying to ask that question….I did it for you…..and now you know.

Have a spooky good time.  And as always….Be well and Be Safe….

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”