Maynard

@Quelklef

milk consumer

maynards.site/

girly but not a girl

name-color: #C09

Maynard @Quelklef11/3/2023, 6:49 PM

Noel B @NoelBWrites

ghost of cohosts past @folly11/2/2023, 8:00 PM

you ever notice that the word "elaborate" is literally "having-put-labor-into-it"? etymonline says elaborate (adj.) 1590s, "wrought by labor", which I think is a canny way to put it. hey that thing has detail and/or a kind of grandeur. someone worked to make it so

#etymology #elaborate

Maynard @Quelklef11/3/2023, 6:09 PM

i fucking love this shit dude

other ones:

disintegrate is dis-integrate is "undo integration"
i've heard that "wisdom" (wise-dom) had original meaning something like "ability to see the world clearly"
information as in-formation as "a bunch of data put into a meaningful structure"
individuation as in-dividuation as in-division

sometimes these things really change how i look at a word. just wish i could remember any of the ones ive thought of 🤒. (of the above, only the first is "mine", and that one doesn't feel that insightful to me)

Noel B @NoelBWrites11/3/2023, 6:31 PM

My favorite is when I realized "breakfast" is "break-fast" as in, you're breaking the fast of the previous night with your first meal of the day.

So I excitedly told Spouse (English is their first language) about it and they were like "yeah? It's the same in Spanish (my first language)" and it blew my mind lmao

Desayuno = des-ayuno (des is a prefix analogous to "un-" and "ayuno" means "fast")

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in reply to @folly's post:

Edda @eaves11/2/2023, 8:09 PM

interesting to compare and contrast this with "belabor" in terms of what they connote

in reply to @Quelklef's post:

~@modulusshift11/4/2023, 4:19 PM

Whoa that "wisdom" one is a bit of a ride. Okay, so like, there was a split in Old English of one root word into "wise" and "wit", one with wisdom might be a wizard, one with wit would be a wita, and perhaps may be called to the witena gemot (assembly of wita), which is the earliest form of Parliament in the UK. "Parliament" is the French name, after all, this is the native Anglo-Saxon name.

But "wit" meaning "vision" or "sense" is still in living memory! "Knocked the wits out of him" or "witless" or "keep your wits about you" etc etc. And I mean, "sense" itself kind of has the opposite end of the doublet, why is "sensible" about thinking, "nonsense" is gibberish, and yet "sensitive" and "sense" itself and even "insensible" are about feelings? I mean, in a way, "I think, therefore I am" kinda came along and ruined it! (The fucking rationalists strike again!) you can see before the influence of that philosophy, thinking and feeling were much more synonymous, to the point that we still conflate "sentient" (literally "having feeling") with "sapient" ("having thought") in AI discussions to this day!

Oh and to wrap up the bow, those words are all distantly related to Latin vidi "I saw", which eventually became "vision" and "video" in English, so the "seeing/thinking" duality goes back basically to the beginning.

Edit: I'm upgrading this to a share lol