#istoki

DELTA AIRLINES

Oh man I wasn’t watching that one but that could have informed my response:

 I posted an explanation but you were in the bathroom

istoki

replied to your post

“Hey linguistics side of tumblr is there a word for words that are most...”

i've never called tefillin phylactery and should i be concerned about the lich

Yeah it’s really only used if you’re like “Sometimes it’s translated as ‘phylacteries’  but just call them tefillin, it wouldn’t kill you to use an easily pronounceable Hebrew word for a Jewish ritual object and also ancient Hebrew is a classic language so swapping it out for a rarely-used word of ancient Greek origin is a waste of time”

You should not be concerned about liches unless you are in a D&D game in which case, roll for initiative.

I decided to do a little bit of Wikipedia time about this and I want to present the fruits of my labor:

The etymology of phylactery is from a Greek word for an amulet that itself came from the Greek word for guard/protect, so something that guards things due to holy power, and then it got used as a term in Christianity to mean a box containing holy relics which is how it got used for tefillin since they’re a box containing specific holy texts, mostly about G-d’s sovereignty and our obligations to remember our origins and pass our religion and history down to the next generation.

And then when D&D was invented they used the idea of spell-casters becoming undead and functionally immortal (liches) through a ritual that among other things binds the soul to an object, often a box with arcane runes but also sometimes an amulet-like thing, hence how they came up with the name for this ritual object (that also serves as a way to make liches possible to defeat in gameplay mechanics, since you can destroy them by destroying the phylactery).

If you looked at the D&D description and were like “OP did you mean Horcrux”: yeah Horcruxes are pretty much the same thing by a different name (etymology for that is a bit more direct and is often credited to the French dehors for outside and the word crux for soul/basic essence, as in ‘the crux of the matter’). 

IMPOSSIBLE.