Tell us why we should unexpectedly come to love your hobby.

  • @BluetreefrogOPM
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    English
    161 year ago

    etymology

    Give us your best word origin.

    • @HonoraryMancunian
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      381 year ago

      Not that person but I always enjoyed helicopter, because it’s broken down into helico and pter

        • Zagorath
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          231 year ago

          Maybe you were just deliberately baiting for this, but no!

          Helicopter’s etymology actually breaks down into helico and pter. Helico being cognate with helix, and pter being “flying”, from the same root as pterodactyl (flying finger).

          • sadbehr
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            51 year ago

            Super interesting.

            Does that mean that we’re pronouncing either helicopter or pterodactyl wrong? We don’t say the ‘pter’ parts the same way I think?

            • @[email protected]
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              1 year ago

              nah there’s no “wrong” for a common native pronunciation. but for silent p- words specifically, the /pt/ and /ps/ consonant clusters just don’t occur at the start of words in English. so the p goes silent in those words. pterodactyl, psychology. but in languages like Greek and German they do occur!

            • @SeabassDan
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              21 year ago

              Depends on whether the o is before the p or after the r.

        • MxM111
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          31 year ago

          I thought heli is more like a screw. (Not claiming that it is, but that was my understanding)

        • @niktemadur
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          1 year ago

          Pterodactyl - Pter Finger!
          Then there’s choleodoptera and lepidoptera.

      • El Barto
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        -71 year ago

        What about “ligma”?

    • the dopamine fiend
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      1 year ago

      Vodka.

      Take the Russian word for “water,” essential for survival and comfort, and convert it to the diminutive case, indicating something even more precious to you than life itself.

      Words always mean things.

      • teft
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        131 year ago

        Whiskey is similar. It comes from the Gaelic uisge beatha which means water of life.

        • Flying Squid
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          101 year ago

          That’s why you can drink as much as you want and stay hydrated.

          • MxM111
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            61 year ago

            More over, the other ingredient provides calories. Sugar and fat free!

    • ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠
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      141 year ago

      Gotta love cacaphony. I never thought about it until I learned the word euphony, which means “good sounding” from the Greek eu (good) and phone (sound).

      You can see where this is going, right?

      So the Greek kakos means bad, but is cognate with the Latin cacere (to defecate), the word from which we get the informal –if slightly outdated– euphemism “caca” for shit, crap, doodoo.

      So cacaphony, sure, means “bad sounding” but also in a very real sense means “sounds like shit”.


      As a bonus, when I was learning Latin, I was delighted to discover the names Miranda and Amanda mean respectively, literally, good lookin’ and good lovin’.

    • Flying Squid
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      121 year ago

      Not a specific word, but it’s fascinating to me how, because of the Norman invasion in 1066, fancier words are of French origin and lower-class words are Germanic. So the animal is a cow, but we eat beef (boeuf) and the animal is a pig, but we eat pork (porc). Chicken was something even the poor ate, so it didn’t change.

      • @jantin
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        121 year ago

        “Poultry” though

      • @fubo
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        1 year ago

        There are other funny things going on in animal names.

        A “chicken” is a young “cock”, just as a “kitten” is a young “cat”.

        And a “rabbit” was a young “coney” — which rhymes with “honey”.

        But folks got prudish and they didn’t want to talk about cocks and coneys in front of the kids, so words like “chicken” and “rabbit” took over.


        Meanwhile over at the pig farm, how does a farmer call a hog?

        They holler “Soo-ee!”, right?

        They’re speaking Latin. That’s “Sui!” — the vocative form of “sus”, Latin for pig. Folks have been talking to their pigs in Latin for a long, long time.

    • @jantin
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      81 year ago

      One which you won’t be able to unlearn: “Kid” as a word for a child derives from a word “kid” which meant young goat. We’re literally calling human children “goat children” and it’s not even mocking.

      The same thing happened in Swedish, the common word meaning “boy” or “guy” - “kille” is a shortened “killing” - young goat.

    • @[email protected]
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      1 year ago

      Not a single word but equestrian and horse being closely related and both decended from krsos (if you say it out loud you can hear the similar to both horse and latin equs)

    • macrocarpa
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      51 year ago

      Threshold.

      In houses with mud floors, the stalks of wheat (thresh) were spread about as a kind of insulator and absorbative. A thresh hold was a block of wood at the entrance which stopped the thresh from getting spread through the doorway.

      This grew to mean the boundary between the house and the rest of the world, to the point of symbolic ownership. When you cross a threshold you are going from one domain to another.

      We now use it to mean a limit, or the how far you have to go before something changes or breaks. Kinda cool.

      The other one is arrowhead. Terry Pratchett wrote a great piece on “ontic dumping”, where we use one word to mean one thing then associate it with another thing and the connection is just automatically known by all.

      So ->

      We know what this means right. Go in this direction, look at this direction, the thing which needs attention is in this direction. There are arrow heads everywhere. On signage, on interfaces, even on the spacecraft which we have sent careening off into the universe. If other species are out there, they might interact with an object which had an arrowhead on it and would have absolutely no concept of what it means.

      Why does an arrow have a head anyway? Because that’s the way an arrow flies right. The pointy bit, which we call the arrowhead, moves in the direction that it’s pointing. Which is bullshit, because if you hold an arrow horizontally then drop it, it goes straight down. And it only flies in that direction if you apply force at one end of the arrow and propel it in that direction.

      But WHY IS IT CALLED A HEAD?

      It doesn’t resemble a head. There’s no body. Heads don’t usually “point” in the direction of travel. Yet we have taken a word that means “the bit that is important”, because we’ve determined that a head is an important thing, and the bit of a thing whxih does the most of the thinging should be called a head.

      It baffles me.