Notes on 'sacrilegious'

Here's a word that touches on issues of etymology, spelling, and pronunciation, all in four efficient syllables. (Actually, to be more precise, the third syllable of the word alone accomplishes all this.) 'Sacrilegious,' an adjective that may have to do with the sacred but not necessarily with religion, is often misspelled 'sacreligious' by folks who forget this. The confusion is fundamentally etymological; sacrilege comes from the Latin roots sacer, 'sacred,' and legere, 'to gather up, take away,' whereas 'religion' comes from the prefix re-,'back,' and a different Latin root, ligare ('to bind together').

Another interesting fact: in standard speech, 'sacrilegious' used to be pronounced 'sacraLEEjus,' and not 'sacraLIJus' as it almost always is today. In his 1999 work The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations, Charles Harrington Elster notes, "SAK-ri-LIJ-us...was once a beastly mispronunciation[;] but it has long been used by educated speakers and now unquestionably prevails..." True; but that doesn't mean it meets no criticism. Merriam-Webster, in an interesting editorial move, lists the '-LIJ-' pronunication first, as the most prevalent, but marks this same pronunciation with an obelus (÷), meaning that it "is considered by some to be objectionable."

For what it's worth, I use the 'sacraLIJus' pronunciation in my own speech; but whenever I spell the word, I always mentally rehearse the '-LEEjus' pronunciation in my head--my own method for making sure I render the word correctly. To fail to do so, in my book, would definitely constitute sacrilege.