Ghost vs. Spirit

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, good afternoon.

This is Leo Gomez.

Hi, Leo.

From Pennsylvania.

From Pennsylvania?

Yes, sir.

Okay.

Well, welcome to the show.

What can we help you with?

Yes, thank you.

My question is, when I started reading in English, I got across when the some Bibles and some theologians, they mentioned the Holy Spirit, all right? And some ones, they mention the Holy Ghost. So my question is, is there any difference? Is there the same? Or there’s got to be some kind of difference.

-huh.

Very interesting.

Good question.

That is a question that I have asked myself for a long time. And I didn’t look it up. So is there a difference between the Holy Spirit and the Holy Ghost? And I’ve got to tell you, Leo, I’m across the table here from a woman who grew up in a preacher’s house. So she surely has the answer.

Well, Leo, let me ask you first. May we ask what your first language is?

My first language? Oh, it’s Hispanic. Castellano, Spanish.

Oh, Castellano. Okay. Because you have different words for that same kind of thing in Spanish then, don’t you?

Well, actually, no, because we sell the Holy Spirit.

Right.

Espiritu Santo. We don’t use ghosts.

Right.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah, that’s what I mean. You use a different word for ghosts, right?

Yes.

Like phantasma?

Yeah, we use phantasma. And I would say that there’s a similar difference nowadays between ghost and spirit. It used to be that ghost could be used for spirit and that kind of thing. But now we tend to think of ghost as the kind of thing you would find in a haunted house, the spirit of somebody who once lived.

Right, an apparition, something that you can see, right?

Yes.

Except exactly in the context you’re talking about when you talk about the Holy Trinity and the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.

Exactly, yes.

Yeah.

But the word spirit today, I think, in English has a much more generic term. You can talk about having school spirit or a spirit of camaraderie. You wouldn’t talk about having school ghost or the ghost of camaraderie.

So the Holy Ghost, back in the days that the King James Bible was put together, they weren’t imagining that Jesus Christ, a pale, transparent version of him, was looking over your shoulder, right? They were thinking about kind of the soul of Christ or like the essence of Christ.

Right. Ghost and spirit were more similar back then, in other words. Does that make sense, Leo?

Yeah, it does make sense. All right, well.

Cheers.

Thank you very much for coming in. Ciao, Anne.

Take care, Anne.

It’s an excellent show. Congratulations.

Oh, thank you, Leo. It’s a great question. We appreciate it.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, the Spanish fantasma is like phantom in English. But we have these archaic words. Sometimes they last only kind of ensconced in these phrases like Holy Ghost, and we sometimes just don’t break them out to say, oh, wait a second, that’s not the Scooby-Doo ghost I was thinking of.

Right, right, or like you might say, give up the ghost. You know, he died, he gave up the ghost, but it’s…

Oh, but that’s the same ghost as Holy Ghost, right? It gave up his soul. The soul kind of floated away out of his corporeal form.

Yeah, I suppose. There was a time when ghost and spirit, I think, were more similar in meaning, that they were more interchangeable, and I think that’s what’s going on here.

Ghost has got a long pedigree anyway.

Very long.

Back into the heart of the lost roots of German, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Geist, right. Like poltergeist, zeitgeist.

Yeah, that kind of thing.

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