Grace O'Boyle comes from Meenbanad, near Dungloe in Co Donegal. She now lives with her niece in Leicester. She was 100 last September which means that she has seen the sun go down in three centuries. Some few years ago she confided in me that she refused point-blank to bless herself in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. She was brought up believing that the Holy Ghost was the third person of the Trinity; why, she asked me then, did they change the name to Holy Spirit? "What does it matter to you?" I teased her, "a woman who prays in Irish, and to the Spiorad Naomh at that?" She laughed.
Ghost was spelled gost or gast in Middle English, and it comes from Old English gast. The word's original meaning was "the soul regarded as the seat of life; the principle of life." This sense was known to Chaucer. In his telling of the sad story of Pyramus and Thisbe in The Legend of Good Women he has: "This woful man, that was nat fully ded, Whan that he herde the name of Tisbe cryen, On hire he caste his hevy, dedly yen (eyes), And doun agayn, and yeldeth up the gost."
But by this time ghost had also come to mean the soul of a dead person that returned to be seen by the living. Shakespeare, of course, has this meaning in Hamlet: "There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave To tell us this."
The origin of Holy Ghost lies in the Hebrew ruah ha-godesh, Holy Spirit. Ruah meant breath, the breath of God, the force which inspired Israel's prophets and judges. When the Old Testament was translated into Greek the Hebrew name became pneuma hagion, pneuma meaning breath or wind; when the Bible was translated into Latin (the Vulgate) in the fourth century pneuma hagion was rendered spiritus sanctus, spiritus also meaning breath or wind. The AngloSaxons used halig gast; in Middle English this became holi gost. Not until the beginning of the 16th century did the h in ghost appear, probably influenced by the Flemish gheest. The 1549 Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible of 1611 has Holy Ghost; So has the Catholic Rheims New Testament of 1582. In the 20th century the churches decided that Spirit was a more appropriate word than Ghost, which now means nothing but a sceptre to all but a few like my friend Grace from Meenbanad.