“Rich people” is an appropriate, emotionally neutral term. That’s how journalism should be, and in most cases I want journalism: not polemic, not comedy.
But in this case I want polemic and comedy, so let’s call them “Rich humans” – or better yet, “Rich hominids”.
Speaking of rich, here’s something else – I just learned this the other day –
Our modern diva derives from the Latin dives, “divine, godlike” (cognate of ancient “Zeus” and modern “deity”), and is embodied in the Roman personal name Divus, “rich”. Here is an excerpt from an interesting blog post on the subject by scholar Peter Kruschwitz:
One of the recurring features of the Latin inscriptions (of Cologne just as much as everywhere else, of course) is mention of gods or other spirits – dei, deae, divi, divini .
This reminded him (and me) of a question he had asked a few weeks earlier, and which I had shamefully delayed to answer: is there a link, etymologically, between divus (‘godlike’) and divinus (‘divine’) on the one hand and dives (‘rich’) on the other?
Or, as my son had put it in a Skype conversation, just to puzzle his already perplexed father a little further … suntne divini divites ?
The answer is … probably yes, actually. Divus , as Latin deus , is related to an Indo-European root that signifies ‘heaven’ or ‘sky’ (incidentally, the same root that survives in the English word ‘Tuesday’ and German ‘Dienstag’).
Dives , in turn, has been explained in relevant etymological dictionaries as an adjective that denotes the (pecuniary) power of someone upon whom the gods do smile – in a similar way in which fortuna-tus may refer to someone who has been blessed, financially, by Fortuna.
Morphologically, the word formation appears to follow a simple logic: a dives being someone whose influence (and affluence) is based on the approval of the divi just as an eques (‘knight’, ‘horseman’) is someone whose might is based on the power of equi (‘horses’).
The Petrified Muse is the blog of Peter Kruschwitz, Professor of Ancient Cultural History (Antike Kulturgeschichte) at the University of Vienna and Fellow of the Pontifical Academy for Latin (Pontificia Academia Latinitatis).
