BLASPHEMY (blasphemia, or blasphemiam), in middle-age writers, denotes simply the blaming or condemning of a person or thing. The word is Greek, blasphemias, from blasptos, ludo. Among the Greeks to blaspheme was to use words of evil omen, or that portended something ill, which the ancients were careful to avoid, substituting in lieu of them other words
of softer and gentler import, sometimes the very reverse Blasphemy of the proper ones.