My favorite inventor is the person who mixed potatoes with mayonnaise and called it a salad.
@Alice cause "salad" originally meant anything chipped and sprinkled with salt long before it meant specifically lettuce, etc.
I haven't done one of these in a while, so here goes!
Hey #Women, #LGBTQ+ and #BIPoC folx! Are you an expert in something? Do you have a fancy degree or a lot of experience in some field/hobby? Do you like to infodump about it? Then out yourself in the replies below!
I'll start. Hi 👋 I'm Alice. I'm multi-queer (pan/bisexual and nonbinary). I'm an expert lockpicker and data scientist, and I have an education in computer science, psychology, and statistics.
Your turn 😊
@alice hi! I'm Alex, transmasc yarn dragon and #hopepunk word wizard. #AMA about #knitting, #Minecraft, #SFF #worldbuilding and #linguistics including grammar/usage and #etymology. If I didn't know it, I'll know how to find out!
Alex, the Hearth Fire
boosted
The surprisingly connected origins of "helicopter" and "wallet".
#etymology #wordnerd #linguistics#HistoricalLinguistics #language #words #lingcomm #helicopter #wallet #turning
The surprisingly connected origins of "helicopter" and "wallet".
#etymology #wordnerd #linguistics#HistoricalLinguistics #language #words #lingcomm #helicopter #wallet #turning
Alex, the Hearth Fire
boosted
The surprisingly connected origins of "helicopter" and "wallet".
#etymology #wordnerd #linguistics#HistoricalLinguistics #language #words #lingcomm #helicopter #wallet #turning
The surprisingly connected origins of "helicopter" and "wallet".
#etymology #wordnerd #linguistics#HistoricalLinguistics #language #words #lingcomm #helicopter #wallet #turning
Jess Mahler
and 1 other
boosted
Last night, right before going to bed:
Me, to spouse, who knows some basic German and who also took linguistics classes in college: So, German is a compound-happy language, and also has grammatical gender. What is the gender of a compound noun made up of nouns that have different genders?
He didn’t know, so we had a speculative and silly conversation about it that I mostly don’t recall, and then I tried looking it up. Apparently the compound noun gets its gender from the noun closest to the end of the word. (Germans, please feel free to correct me, as my research was brief and shallow.)
After more silliness, I remarked that I was feeling punchy, then stopped and speculated that punchy is derived from punch-drunk (answer: yes, which is sobering), after which spouse remarked that individual body parts can be described as being asleep in English, but what other things can they be? (I’ll put some things I thought were interesting about this in the next post in this thread.)
More silliness ensued, and then I said:
Where do compound words come from? Well, when two morphemes love each other very much…
(A linguistics professor from my college said that English is almost as compound-happy as German, which isn’t surprising as it’s also a Germanic language. We mostly don’t recognize it and don’t spell most of them that way.)
1/2
Last night, right before going to bed:
Me, to spouse, who knows some basic German and who also took linguistics classes in college: So, German is a compound-happy language, and also has grammatical gender. What is the gender of a compound noun made up of nouns that have different genders?
He didn’t know, so we had a speculative and silly conversation about it that I mostly don’t recall, and then I tried looking it up. Apparently the compound noun gets its gender from the noun closest to the end of the word. (Germans, please feel free to correct me, as my research was brief and shallow.)
After more silliness, I remarked that I was feeling punchy, then stopped and speculated that punchy is derived from punch-drunk (answer: yes, which is sobering), after which spouse remarked that individual body parts can be described as being asleep in English, but what other things can they be? (I’ll put some things I thought were interesting about this in the next post in this thread.)
More silliness ensued, and then I said:
Where do compound words come from? Well, when two morphemes love each other very much…
(A linguistics professor from my college said that English is almost as compound-happy as German, which isn’t surprising as it’s also a Germanic language. We mostly don’t recognize it and don’t spell most of them that way.)
1/2
Alex, the Hearth Fire
boosted
The #ConnectedAtBirth #etymology of the week is TEXT/SUBTLE #wotd #text #subtle#BackToSchool
The #ConnectedAtBirth #etymology of the week is TEXT/SUBTLE #wotd #text #subtle#BackToSchool
d@nny disc@ mc²
boosted
Spouse was wondering about the etymology of “record” in English because he’s learning Spanish and apparently it means “remember”.
It turns out that English’s “record” comes from Old French and Latin “remember”.
That’s interesting on its own (a record being a memory is poetic). But then it turns out that the “-cord” part of record comes from the Latin word for “heart”. So I’m guessing that the English phrase “by heart” has much the same origin.
I’ve always liked that playing memorized music on an instrument is called “playing by heart”.
Spouse was wondering about the etymology of “record” in English because he’s learning Spanish and apparently it means “remember”.
It turns out that English’s “record” comes from Old French and Latin “remember”.
That’s interesting on its own (a record being a memory is poetic). But then it turns out that the “-cord” part of record comes from the Latin word for “heart”. So I’m guessing that the English phrase “by heart” has much the same origin.
I’ve always liked that playing memorized music on an instrument is called “playing by heart”.
I also want to chew a little more on that word, " #project ." It comes from Latin for something thrown forward, https://www.etymonline.com/word/project which French thinker Merleau-Ponty framed as becoming a part of the world by throwing yourself toward your goals.
Read this way, projects are how someone stretches out and shapes the world even as they are shaped by it. That can be big-deal stuff like becoming a household name (but that's not YOU, is it? Being so well-known means your name will glide and skip on many tongues that don't know the weight of it), but it can also be something closer to home, like little scribbles that thrill you and no one else, how the wind smells when a new story starts to grow. Breathing everything around you a little more deeply and rooting deeper into the earth in which you threw the seed.
A project doesn't have to make you rich or scatter your name far and wide. Projects at heart are how we live, flying gleefully into our being even while we grow more grounded and unflappable from knowing who and where we are. Big or small, known everywhere or to one, it's all worth it and makes us more whole. #TootEssay #etymology
Etymological aside: I wonder how many people assume, like I did, that "trailblaze" means burning a path where there was none, when it actually means putting marks on trees or a path for others to follow? https://www.etymonline.com/word/trailblazer Trailblazing in its original meaning is not a destructive or disruptive process, but a communal and communicative one for those who went before to signal a way for others to follow, if they wish. #Etymology
Voilà longtemps que je me demande d'où sort le "gris" dans vert-de-gris.
La réponse n'a rien à voir avec la couleur : c'est une déformation de... "Viride Grecum", c'est à dire vert de Grèce.
https://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/vert-de-gris
#TIL #etymology #etymologie