Why etymologies matter: How tracing words can illuminate history (2024)

satvikpendem•about 3 hours ago

A good book on this is Proto by Laura Spinney, it covers all the branches of Proto-Indo-European and also postulates that the entire family may have started from as few as a hundred speakers who were steppe nomads, which is mindboggling if true.

keiferski•about 2 hours ago

I really love etymology, because I like to imagine words having "lives", and then tracking those lives over the centuries. It's fascinating to think that a word might have begun in China thousands of years ago, migrated to India, then the Islamic World, then Europe, and are now everyday things in English.

adzm•about 3 hours ago

I'm never going to look at a <div> the same

tys-•43 minutes ago

The demons come out when centering

hiccuphippo•about 3 hours ago

And then Hello became Allo in French and Alo in Spanish, which is only used as a greeting over the phone and never as a general greeting.

mcswell•about 2 hours ago

There was a wealthy Italian who was building a villa in the US, and told the architect he wanted a "hollow statue" in it. The architect looked far and wide for a hollow statue, without success. Finally he came back to the client and told him that no one he talked to had heard of hollow statues. The client said, "Oh, it's one of those things that rings, and you pick it up and say "Halo, 'stat you kiddo?"

card_zero•about 1 hour ago

Joke needs tweaking to take into account that all large bronze sculptures are hollow.

thadt•about 2 hours ago

And likewise became EHLO which could also be used as a greeting over the phone if you were you were talking to an email server.

mirmor23•about 2 hours ago

many times, even etymology does not make things intuitive: e.g. 'spendthrift'. similarly, many English words are close, but their meaning diverge a lot. e.g. condemn vs condone, or vindicate vs vindictive.

card_zero•about 1 hour ago

Thrift was formerly a word for profits, now it makes sense. But I recognize the snowclone as a popular 16th century way to form personal verb-noun descriptors like cutpurse, upstart, sawbones, spoilsport, dreadnought. This is still productive because midwit is a recent addition. (Eh, I suppose mid isn't a verb, but I think it's the same pattern.)

mirmor23•9 minutes ago

the etymology of snowclone itself is amusing ;)

Why etymologies matter: How tracing words can illuminate history (2024)

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