Hubris? Meet Nemesis!
So, Hubris is a Greek word, dating back to ancient days. If you had it, you might meet Nemesis, the goddess of retribution. You know, divine retribution.
It's not nice to think you are cool or powerful as a god. That's all getting uppity and stuff, if you're a mere mortal.
A lot of fundamentalists and other Christians like Greek words. It's sort of a fetish with them. Like the father in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," they assign some sort of extra importance to words in that language. Lots of early manuscripts of the New Testament were in Greek, it seems, so pastors study Greek, in their way, while in the seminary. So, if you know a little Greek, you can "throw Greek phrases 'round the room," like Carly Simon's older sister did with French, and people will either think you're smart or laugh at you.
You'll hear the word "hubris" coming out of pastors' and preachers' mouths from time to time. They equate it with the word "pride" a lot. And "pride," of course, "goeth before a fall," as it is said. Many of them, though, don't really understand hubris, or any other Greek words, for that matter. They saw the words in their books on exegesis. And exegesis is another Greek word, but that's another post altogether. It means "out of" something. As most use it, that something is their nether regions.
But, I digress... Anyhow, that's where Nemesis comes in. See, hubris used to mean "contempt for the gods," because you had to have a lot of pride and arrogance to confront those ancient deities from polytheistic Greece. Now, those deities are all dead and gone, now, it seems, including Nemesis, a relatively minor deity in the pantheon, but a dangerous one, indeed. She was in charge of "God's gonna get you for that," "that" being hubris, see.
Like a lot of ancient Greek words, hubris didn't make the transition into English altogether intact. It gets misused a lot, and most people who use the word don't know the back story of hubris.
As Donald Trump demonstrates, there's no real penalty for hubris these days. Without Nemesis around to mete out punishment, and all those Greek gods perished and gone, there's not much to worry about if you are a hubristic sort of person.
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