A swastika is an uncomfortable symbol for many people; me included.

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Both the swastika symbol and the word swastika have been around longer than their association with the deplorable extremes of the Nazis.

In fact the earlier German name for the symbol was hakenkreuz, meaning “hook cross,” it wasn’t swastika.

There are a few other English words that have been used to describe what everyone now recognizes as a swastika.

One was gammadion and dates back to ancient Greek; the gamma part used because the swastika is like four gamma letters stuck together.

A second English term for “swastika” was a cross cramponnee. In this case the crampon was the hook on each arm of the cross. This is obviously related to the spikes mountain climbers wear on their boots called crampons.

The word swastika was in use in English long before the Nazis came to power in Germany.  In fact it was because there was already an English word describing this symbol that the literal hook cross wasn’t used in English.

An American named Louis Snyder wrote a book describing the coming Nazi “iron fist,” as he put it, in which he was the first to connect the pre-existing English word with the then yet-to-be-hated Nazi symbol.

More than 50 years earlier the symbol and the word swastika had arrived in English from Sanskrit with a much more wholesome meaning.

The word svasti meant “well being” so that originally the symbol of svasti, the svastika meant good luck.