Newsgroup: it.cultura.linguistica.inglese
Titolo: Why Is It Called The Passion?

Why Is It Called The Passion?
How Jesus' suffering got its name.
Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ -- which gorily depicts the
sufferings of Jesus during his last days - opens tomorrow amid great
anticipation and controversy. But how did Jesus' anguish on the cross come
to be called the Passion in the first place?
The simple answer is that the English word passion referred to Jesus'
suffering long before it evolved other, more sultry meanings. Today, the
word still refers to Jesus' torments, as well as to retellings of the
crucifixion in the Gospels and elsewhere, even in pieces of music. (Before
Gibson's Passion, for instance, there were Bach's Passions.)
But the Christian meaning and its modern, carnal cousins are not entirely
unrelated. In fact, the more common meanings of the word passion -- strong
emotion, zeal, and sexual desire -- grew organically from the Christian
sense over the course of several centuries.
The English word has its roots in the Latin passio, which means, simply,
"suffering." Its first recorded use is in early Latin translations of the
Bible that appeared in the 2nd century A.D. and that describe the death of
Jesus. The Latin word was borrowed prolifically in Old English religious
texts, where its meaning remained exclusively theological. But when the
Normans invaded Britain in the middle of the 11th century, their conquest
infused thousands of French words -- including passion, which also referred
solely to the sufferings of Jesus -- into the spoken language. The record is
sketchy, but it seems that once passion was in use in both languages, it
began to develop broader meanings. The first new senses in English referred
to martyrdom and physical suffering or affliction, and by the 13th century,
passion was being used to refer to any strong emotion.
The process accelerated greatly as the English vocabulary exploded in the
16th century. Many words accrued new meanings during this period; literature
and vernacular poetry flourished, and a renewed interest in classical
learning may have given Latin a more direct influence on the language as
well. Passion, for instance, may have been shaded by an obscure definition
of the Latin passio as an "affection of the mind" or "emotion."
(Etymologists believe that this more arcane meaning drew from the Greek word
pathos.) Over the course of the century, the word came to signify a panoply
of emotional afflictions, such as "extreme anger," "a literary work marked
by deep emotion," and, finally, "strong sexual attraction or love."
The first sexual usage is attributed to William Shakespeare, who wrote, in
Titus Andronicus, "My sword ? shall ? plead my passions for Lavinia's love."
It wasn't a great leap from Shakespeare to the entirely modern senses of
passion, which developed, with his and others' help, over the next few
decades.
Bonus Explainer: Gibson originally wanted to call his film The Passion, but
he had to change the name when it turned out Miramax already had a project
under development with that title. But why the "the" in "of the Christ"? The
moniker is a less common alternative to just plain Christ, which is a
derivation of a Latin translation of a Greek translation of the Hebrew title
Messiah, which means "the Anointed." In the Geneva and 1611 versions of the
New Testament, the word "Christ" is often preceded by the word "the."

 How Jesus' suffering got its name.
What!  more free advertising for an overrated film?
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