A friend replied to me “You don’t believe in god, why do you say ‘Thank god it’s friday!’?”. Well. Here’s the answer:
I made some decisions in my life that were done with deep conviction. One of these decisions was leaving the church as I don’t believe in some higher being controlling my life and I also think the creation of life wasn’t initiated by something like a god. We just had the luck everything worked out fine and we’re now able to enjoy things like hanging out with friends, huge beef steaks, game consoles, cool music and trips through a world that features nice and relaxing places (sure there are more nice things…I just wrote some that popped up in my mind!). But when using the everyday language, you really can see how society can condition people over the years. A lot of people say, when reaching the friday of a working week: “Thank god it’s friday!” Hold a second. Also people that don’t believe in god use this term, but shouldn’t they be honest and even represent their decision to leave the church in everday life? Sure they should but in this case you could say this is ok, because the weekend (at least the Sunday) was more or less “invented” by the church. So it is quite legitimate to thank the church for that, even if you don’t believe in it.
But in other cases you can also see how false terms can spread throughout a country. Let’s for e.g. take the German term for a cellphone: “Handy“. Holy crap. I think this is one of the most horrible terms in Germany. Motorola invented a portable walkie-talkie and called it “handy-talkie” during the second world war, but in the end I think Loewe owns the dubious pleasure of branding the term Handy in Germany in 1992 with their first D-Net cellphone. I prefer calling it a cellphone or mobile phone, just to keep safe I won’t use the term Handy while talking english anymore. It’s just lame to use this term while talking to english speaking people. There are a lot of false english terms in German language that people use in a wrong way. For example the popular public meetings of people watching soccer games is often called “public viewing” here in Germany. More correct would be “public screening“. Or did you see dead people at your last soccer championships? I hope not! Funny thing is that other countries overtook the term “public viewing” since the soccer world championships 2006. At least people don’t start laughing immediately if you use this term…