From 'Id Mubarak!' to 'Eid Mubarak!'

Remember when we had 'Id mubarak!' - a greeting so innocent, so Jungian in its archetypal purity, that it seemed to spring directly from the collective unconscious? 'Id', after all, was Freud's primal beast: raw, unfiltered joy of festival, ecstatic hunger for biryani, sheer delight in new clothes and sweets. It was the unconscious celebrating itself, a carnival of instinct.

But then Ego arrived, wearing a tie and carrying a dictionary that couldn't tolerate the spelling of 'Id' as it sounded to its ears like 'innate instinctive impulses'. So, somewhere down the corridor of English phonetical committees, the 'I' was elongated into 'Ei' and 'Eid mubarak!' was born, a greeting polished for polite society, stripped of its primal howl. A festival of surrender to the divine was rebranded by Ego's need for order via Romanised spelling. The unconscious wanted to dance barefoot. Ego insisted on shoes and socks of the 'ei' diphthong. Jung would have laughed - the Self trying to unite opposites that Ego hijacked the spelling to assert dominance. So, every time you write 'Eid Mubarak!' remember: you're not merely whispering Eid's victory over Id, but also Ego's win. The archetype of joy is now house-trained, and given a respectable gliding vowel. And, yet, in the laughter of children and smell of kebabs, Id still lurks - grinning, unspelt like an eidiot.