A cretinous post

A few of my mates work in a factory. Due to government subsidies etc it is convenient for the company to hire workers from Poland. Some of the local workers talk to the Polish workers and there is some interchange of Polish and English words. Apparently the word "cretin" gets used a lot, and also "schlipko" [?spelling] which means slowly. Some time ago in the pub there was a conversation that went something like this:

A: Did you know that Cretin means the same in english as it does in Polish?

J: Cretin is a Polish word!!

I began to wonder where exactly the word cretin originated. Hell, it's Sunday and I have nothing better to do. Funnily enough after mentioning my love of Take Our Word For It a few posts back, and then the Landover Baptist Church (*cough*) in the last post, how much of it is it fate to combine them both in this post?

Take Our Word For It's origin for the word cretin.

English borrowed cretin from the French word cretin in 1779. It comes from an earlier word, cretin, which meant "Christian" in the (French) dialects of Valais and Savoie (compare the standard French word, chretien). Its ultimate source is the Latin christianus, "Christian".

!SR