Ask Lemmy

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

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.

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means bad, but is cognate with the Latin cacere (to defecate), the word from which we get the informal –if slightly outdated– euphemism "caca" for shit, crap, doodoo.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

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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