the level of devotion to a person or an ideal. Cult is origionally comes from the word cultus (adoration) or the verb colo (to worship) for which the passive perfect participle (cultum - "having been worshipped"). colo/cultum is interesting as one of the definitions can be "to cultivate". This leads to an interesting point that cultum could be taken to be "having been cultivated" where it is the personality or the ideal is cultivated in the followers and it's the way of handling followers that we use to label as a cult.
That is very interesting and makes me wonder what I was thinking upstate: something is a cult by a person's relation to it. There are people who "cultify" professional sports, and so on.
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branchandroot
linguistics lesson!
Date: 2006-08-26 08:15 am (UTC)Re: linguistics lesson!
Date: 2006-08-28 01:27 am (UTC)