the etymology thread

some one here must be writing from a univeristy. the naswer then is simple. get them to go to http://www.oed.com and look them up.
most univeristies have subscriptions to the online version, and should be available on a uni network. that is the only thing i miss about university, not being able to search the OED. (this is not entirely true)

I don't meant what does it mean to you (For me it means horrible little black 6 legged things). But what does it mean properly, in the dictionary or something?

Did you know a cockroach can have it's head cut off and still run around for two weeks, avoiding detection?

It eventually starves to death.

So if its head is cut off, how does it see or think?

Legend had it that swans sang before they died.

I certainly wouldn't call it invisibility.

In my insect collecting days I always suspected there might be invisible insects.

So therefore I'd have beat you tracer. Despite having my head cut off.

i thought you were being smart alecy barry, but don't worry, it has prob resulted in this thread getting more answer than it would've otherwise. etymology = words, entomology = insects, btw.

also: (for craigly)

4 entries found for etymology.
et·y·mol·o·gy    ( P )  Pronunciation Key  (t-ml-j)
n. pl. et·y·mol·o·gies

1. The origin and historical development of a linguistic form as shown by determining its basic elements, earliest known use, and changes in form and meaning, tracing its transmission from one language to another, identifying its cognates in other languages, and reconstructing its ancestral form where possible.
2. The branch of linguistics that deals with etymologies.

1. An earlier form of a word in the same language or in an ancestor
language. For example, Indo-European *duwo and Old English tw are etymons of Modern English two.
2. A word or morpheme from which compounds and derivatives are formed.
3. A foreign word from which a particular loan word is derived. For example, Latin duo, “two,” is an etymon of English duodecimal.

Etymology is not insects it is linguistics.

at sixes and sevens:
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-six1.htm

dressed up to the nines:
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/122900.html

there were more but i forget...

"Don't Cry for Me, Argentina": "You won't believe me/All you will see is a girl you once knew/Although she's dressed up to the nines/At sixes and sevens with you."

that's great, thanks!

In re: swan song

The legend that swans, which are mute, can sing, but only at their death is a very ancient one. It predates the Christian era.

Pliny the Elder (the guy who famously died investigating the eruption that destroyed Pompeii) mentions it in his book of Nautral History, but only to debunk it. He had followed around several dying swans and damn if they didn't expire silently, he said.

The origins of the legend are unknown, but it is exactly the kind of thing that poets loved to perpetuate, since it makes such a handy metaphor.

my fucking lame college apparently hasn't stumped for the OED login

you don't get that at columbia

n e ways, does anyone know when 'broadsheet newspaper' came to mean 'intelligent/serious/_____ newspaper'?

As opposed to a tabloid, right?

yeah

"tabloid

1884, "small tablet of medicine," trademark name (by Burroughs, Wellcome and Co.) for compressed or concentrated chemicals and drugs, formed from tablet + Gk.-derived suffix -oid , from oeides "like." By 1898, it was being used figuratively to mean a compressed form or dose of anything, hence tabloid journalism (1901), and newspapers that typified it (1918), so called for having short, condensed news articles and/or for being small in size."

Xp

OED has a 1963 quote with broadsheet opposed to tabloid, but it's not clear that it's a full-on quality thing; however, tabloid itself has 1949 quote implying trashy. Quality press seems to be the preferred 60s term.

Sorry - can't c&p, on phone & oed is on computer, which is offline.

Date-specific google book search might add something?

does anyone know when 'broadsheet newspaper' came to mean 'intelligent/serious/_____ newspaper'?

Interesting, I don't believe it has this connotation in the U.S.

I could be wrong, but I don't even remember hearing the term "broadsheet" until reading it on ILX.

But "tabloid" most certainly has the pejorative sense here, even though I'd wager most people don't realize it originally referred to the size/format of the paper.

Broadsheet is definitely a Britishism

In fact, a 1998 guardian quote in this offline oed is the one that uses 'the broadsheets' in the way we would. That seems very late though.

cheers bros

that is funny re lateness, but tbqh in all my years reading old newspapers i cannot recall seeing 'broadsheeet' used to mean posh (and yeah it does seem to be a britishism, and in fact it has outlived actual daily broadsheets, of which there is now only one)

even though I'd wager most people don't realize it originally referred to the size/format of the paper.

Strangely the Online Etymology entry for tabloid (posted above) claims that it was the journalism rather than the size of the paper that led to it being called 'tabloid' but unlike the OED, I can't see their citations just the supposed dates.

Boradsheet used to just mean a newspaper and ironically, I'm sure at some point in English history, it did not denote a thing of much integrity or repute.

[From tabloid journalism, from Tabloid, trademark for a drug or chemical in condensed form.]

Looking again the whole broadsheet as quality newspaper bit is marked as 'draft partial entry June 2004'. Must be recent.

(xp, yes earlier c19th usage is as variant of broadside)

Broadside is at least 16th century, I believe, or at least 17th.

ok will bump this at a busier time but::::

when do yall reckon that the word "hollywood" came to be understood as it is today, ie not just the suburb of los angeles?

oed's first ref is 1926

Silver screen fan magazines and/or Variety would be the obvious suspects for popularizing this term. 1926 would seem reasonably on target for its emergence. The studios didn't start to concentrate in the LA area until maybe 1915, iirc.

Allow at least a few years of verbal usage before that?

Before 1926 I mean. The OED uses published quotes as a guide, I wd nearly always assume a word had a degree of popular currency before it's used in print, unless it's a deliberate neologism.

wondering why "ream" means a large quantity of something and found its etymology interesting

From Middle English reme, rem, from Old English rēam (“cream”), from Proto-Germanic *raumaz (“cream”), from Proto-Indo-European *rewǝgh- (“to sour [milk]”). Cognate with Dutch room (“cream, sour cream”), German Rahm (“cream”), Norwegian rømme (“sour cream”), Icelandic rjómi (“cream”). See also ramekin

Just learned that “menorah” and “minaret” are related and both contain versions of the word for light and fire that is n-r.

Proto-Semitic nūr- that is.

Almost as interesting to me as finding out that although the usual word for work in Slavic languages is related to the word that gave us “robot,” the word for work in the (non-Slavic) languages Romanian and Hungarian is derived from another Slavonic word meaning “torture.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Greek_and_Latin_roots_in_English/H%E2%80%93O#nem-

If you scroll down to the entry for nomad, the meaning in English is "those who let pasture herds," which I find hard to parse as a sentence. The general meaning I get (I think), i.e. people who look for pastures for their herds, but that "let" is impenetrable to me. Is its usage here archaic?

it's wiki so could just be user error. my guess is they're using it in the sense of "To allow possession of (a property etc.) in exchange for rent" but mixed up who is on what side of the transaction

hmm .. wait. now i'm rethinking it. i think what might be happening is "pasture" is being used in its verb form. so it's like, "those who let [their] herds [go to] pasture" ... it's very awkward in any case

I wonder if they mean "let" in the "rent out" sense? I'm not an expert on nomadic pastoralism but I can imagine a scenario where a landowner rents a herd of goats to graze on the land, or just to have an audience.

In which case it would be "those who rent out pasture animals".

it's an artifact of machine translation, not an unusual usage

yeah, I think 'let' & 'lease' are basically synonyms in that sense

Perhaps he's a nomad since he doesn't own any land, and just uses others' properties to graze

I was thinking about "Hi" in place of "Hello" as a greeting just earlier, especially in UK English.

I'm re-reading the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (c1978) and there's a section where Zaphod Beeblebrox (essentially Space-Elon) goes around saying "Hi" to people, and it's considered by the author's voice to be a bit modern and vulgar.

I seem to remember certain people being a bit annoyed by "Hi" when I was growing up - it was seen as slangy and "an Americanism" (god forbid!) But I'm not sure if this is a real or false memory.

It is an Americanism I think?

"Cretin" derives from "Christian."

Oxford Languages explains:

late 18th century: from French crétin, from Swiss French crestin ‘Christian’ (from Latin Christianus ), here used to mean ‘human being’, apparently as a reminder that, though deformed, such people were human and not beasts.

Also didn't realize Brits usually pronounce it CRET-in, instead of CREE-tin.

xp, yes it is, but i wouldn't have thought twice about someone saying "Hi" to me for a long time. Just wondering at what point did it just became generally accepted over here

(xp) I thought when the Ramones sang about the Cree-tin Hop it was just the Ramones being the Ramones, I've just found out that's how Americans pronounce it!

I remember it was still possible seeing goiters in the 1990s in my region. Apparently Switzerland was a prime reservoir of cretinism until a guy named Otto Bayard found out about iodine deficiency, and was the first country to introduce iodized salt to its population in 1922.

Which brought me to learn the etymology of "rickety": from rickets which was linked to vitamin D deficiency. The disease is called rachitisme in French and we still have an adjective (rachitique) that means scrawny or puny, as opposed to shaky / about to collapse in English.

And why not post a third time. I remember being taught by an English professor that hello/hi were equivalent and appropriate in all contexts, and that you could address Obama by saying hi Mr President. Which for us is mildly shocking, but only confirms the level of informality in American English. If I said "salut" by mistake to some important person, I'd have to crawl under the carpet and excuse myself profusely - and we consider ourselves pretty informal compared to the French.

> The disease is called rachitisme in French and we still have an adjective (rachitique) that means scrawny or puny

which makes me think of the slangy adjective in AAVE, "ratchet" which according to this came from Louisiana

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratchet_(slang)

...but they don't tie it to Louisiana French, but rather "wretched". I wonder if there is a link, or if rachitique is old enough to be in that New World dialect.

I remember being taught by an English professor that hello/hi were equivalent and appropriate in all contexts,

I think he was pulling your leg.

so 'boonies' obv comes from 'boondocks'... but did you know that boondocks is derived from the Tagalog word bundok which means "mountain"

apparently from the Philippine–American War

dollar

Attested since the mid-16th century, from early Dutch daler, daalder, from German Taler, Thaler (“dollar”), earlier Joachimsthaler, literally “of Joachimstal”, the town where the original dollars were minted. The name means “(Saint) Joachim's valley”, from Joachim + Tal. Possibly reinforced by the Dutch leeuwendaalder, which was also used in the American colonies. Doublet of taler / thaler and tolar.

i thought it was czech

yeah stop taking credit for everything, germany!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20200107-welcome-to-jchymov-the-czech-town-that-invented-the-dollar

I imagine it was originally German speaking.

well they were ruled by germans but czech was a real language ya know. motherfuckers act like they forgot about jan hus!

The locally made coins were known in German as “Joachimsthalerguldengrosch”, meaning “guldengroschen from Joachimsthal”. This impractically long and unwieldy name was gradually shortened – first to “Joachimsthaler”, then to “Thaler”, and finally, in Czech, to “tolar”.

https://ceskamincovna.cz/en/from-tolar-to-dollar-2543/

sure, they invented the thaler (aka dollar), but it was Maria Theresa who made it famous - before the USA ever jumped on the dollar bandwagon.

"invented the dollar" ... well, they minted a currency the name of which was eventually truncated and elsewhere used as a shorthand for coins that are money. i mean, money is a fiction but i don't really understand the concept of "inventing the dollar" ... if we called it something else then it would just be called something else

but ... they are clearly proud of their unesco world heritage status so i will not push it

I thought this revive would be about "feisty", originally from old english fysten meaning fart, via fysting curre, stinking/farting hound as derogatorily applied to small scrappy dogs.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/feisty