Etymology

jenks

jenks

thread death
The English word 'found' is not only the past tense of 'find' but can also mean both 'establish' and 'cast metal'.

These three uses are due to three different words of origin:
1) Old English findan 'to find'
2) Latin fundāre 'to lay a foundation'
3) Latin fundere 'to pour out'
 
sus

sus

Moderator
That's right, discovering and making, curating and creating, selection and assembling, they're interwoven parts of a process. All manufacturing is recycling etc
 
V

version

Well-known member
I recently read a tweet where someone pointed out that thing people do in essays where they'll get into etymology when they don't really have anything to say and now it drives me nuts.
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
version said:
I recently read a tweet where someone pointed out that thing people do in essays where they'll get into etymology when they don't really have anything to say and now it drives me nuts.
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Yeah I think etymology is interesting, but if you pay enough attention to it, it can be useful in that it lets you sense the dynamism and morphology of language over time, and how meaning is more of a continuous, evolving field than an array of discrete, fixed definitions.
 
Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
EG for me, learning that 'maternal' is cognate with 'matrix' changed not only how I understand both of those terms, but it also helped me understand the substrate beneath all words.

This stuff also changes how I view the "realness" of words, or really how established they are. You could understand the general patterns and schemas of sememes such that all the "viable" un-uttered neologisms become "real" despite their not being in any dictionary.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy

toady (n.)​

"servile parasite," 1826, apparently shortened from toad-eater "fawning flatterer" (1742), originally (1620s) "the assistant of a charlatan," who ate a toad (believed to be poisonous) to enable his master to display his skill in expelling the poison. The verb is recorded from 1827. Related: Toadied; toadying.
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I love etymology and increasingly find myself looking up words and phrases I've always taken for granted, I don't know why I was so incurious as to not think about this stuff for the first near 4 decades of my life
 
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