Etymology Lesson: hope

From Old English, hopa meaning, “wish, expectation.”

There are theories that it is related to the word hop, as in, “leaping forward in expectation.”  In the myth of Pandora’s Box, the last evil to escape the box is Hope.  Some say hope is what saves the world, some say there is a reason it was locked inside the box with all the other evils.  Hope is a dangerous siren, luring us to believe in things that will never be.  Tempting us to betray our instincts and abandon our better intellect, blindly trusting that things will turn out the way we wish them to, instead of accepting the truth of what they are.