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You are here Origin of the word, Silly according to Oxford Dictionary:
"late Middle English (in the sense 'deserving of pity or sympathy'): alteration of dialect seely 'happy', later 'innocent, feeble', from a West Germanic base meaning 'luck, happiness'. The sense 'foolish' developed via the stages 'feeble' and 'unsophisticated, ignorant.'"
Words, meanings and usages change all the time, and more so religious language in different cultures. Here is the full extract from a blog and source of this word, Silly:
Anyone who’s taken a linguistics class knows that “semantic drift” happens. It just does. If it didn’t, we’d all still be speaking Latin and Anglo Saxon. Vowels change, consonants drop off, lots of stuff happens to Language, capital L, over time. You know what word I could add to this list? “Silly.” Silly actually means “blessed.” Like: The silly Virgin Mary. Technically that’s true, but over the last several hundred years, the meaning has changed to mean, well, ‘silly’. So yeah, this article is silly. Words mean what they communicate, period. Anyone who says differently is selling something. -- A comment by Rick Widen @ 10 Words That You've Probably Been Misusing, by Tyler Vendetti
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