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

      • the dopamine fiend@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        18
        ·
        edit-2
        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.

      • ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        13
        ·
        1 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means bad, but is cognate with the Latin cacere (to defecate), the word from which we get the informal –if slightly outdated– euphemism “caca” for shit, crap, doodoo.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@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        1 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.

        • fubo@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          11
          ·
          edit-2
          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.

      • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        edit-2
        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)

      • jantin@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        1 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.

      • macrocarpa@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        1 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.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      10
      ·
      1 year ago

      Etymology is fascinating. My dad had the full version of the OED when I was a kid (compressed down so that 4 pages fit on 1 page in the volume, but it was still in 2 volumes plus a supplement). I loved it. I looked up the history of words I didn’t know all the time.

    • guyrocket@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 year ago

      Etymology is interesting, I agree. I also find language in general fascinating. You might consider studying some basic linguistics, either academically or via youtube. How language works is really interesting, IMHO.

      • ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        1 year ago

        I in fact have. I’ve always loved language, but it was not until college that I began studying it formally.

        I started learning Lakota, Japanese, and Latin on top of my English and Spanish. And while I dropped Lakota from lack of resources and Japanese because I didn’t get along with the teacher, I stuck with the Latin and considered getting a minor in it. Just having Latin and Spanish to compare side-by-side was fascinating.

        My main degree program was CS, though, and (dating myself here) the main problem in AI at the time was natural language processing, which means all of us in the AI specialization had to learn a lot about phonemes, read Noam Chomsky, and generally become linguistics nerds. That bubble burst my foury year, though, and left us scrambling for another problem in AI to study.

        Since I didn’t end up using either my Latin or my linguistic modeling professionally, I rolled those interests into the hobbies of etymology and her dark cousin, the generation of neologisms.

        • Bluetreefrog@lemmy.worldOPM
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          generation of neologisms

          Ngl, I had to look up what neologism meant, but now I know that it = new words, expressions or usages.

          It fascinates me how fast language is changing. When I was young verse was never used as a verb, as in “today we are versing another team”.

          Or the word “meme” has completely changed meaning in less than two decades. It’s like watch evolution on fast-forward.

      • rockSlayer@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        There are moments where I look into the history of a word, and find out that it has a direct connection to PIE. For the rest of that day, I wonder what the language sounded like or what they called it

    • greensage@lib.lgbt
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 year ago

      I have a circle of friends that LOVE this. It kinda gets annoying when literally every conversation turns into a discussion on linguistics. It was interesting at first, but too much of a good thing and all that.