NABOKV-L post 0013489, Tue, 10 Oct 2006 11:16:42 -0400

Carolyn: it’s also worth noting that ‘demon’ has suffered a downwards semantic shift — the early Greek pantheons had a lower-level of deities called ‘daimonia’ who were not necessarily evil in the modern ‘demonic’ sense. The distinction is preserved by us computer literates [sic]: we name certain UNIX processes as DAEMONS, preserving the Anglo-Saxon spelling and sound (‘daymon’) to indicate their benign, albeit puckish, properties. (See p. 51, my Computer Contradictionary, MIT Press, 1995)

Stan Kelly-Bootle

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