Recent Posts

71

English & Linguistics / Re: What happened to "You're welcome"?

« Last post by pooka on December 24, 2023, 09:37:50 PM »

***Check posting dates***
I was looking for a thread about typography.
And I saw this thread and it made me wistful.
But also, it's now a hit song which briefly made a lot of people say "you're welcome" but also made it weird for people to say you're welcome.

72

English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« Last post by Jonathon on December 18, 2023, 10:03:04 AM »

Encyclopedia Britannica says that may not be true:

The original term is of doubtful meaning. Pliny explains that the word denotes a coffin of limestone from the Troad (the region around Troy) which had the property of dissolving the body quickly (Greek sarx, “flesh,” and phagein, “to eat”), but this explanation is questionable; religious and folkloristic ideas may have been involved in calling a coffin a body eater.

73

English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« Last post by Tante Shvester on December 18, 2023, 07:04:43 AM »

I was thinking about the phagos in sarcophagus. And wondering what those sarcophagi were eating, and it turns out that they made them out of limestone so that the stone would digest the body.

If that was the point, though, why even bother with a sarcophagus at all.  If you want the body to be decomposed and digested, just leave it out and forget about the stone box.

74

English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« Last post by Tante Shvester on December 01, 2023, 12:23:43 PM »

What is the opposite of contraband?  Proband?

75

English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« Last post by Jonathon on November 29, 2023, 08:04:46 AM »

Huh indeed.

On old manuscripts, "descent" was indicated by a forked sign resembling the branching lines of a genealogical chart; the sign also happened to look like a bird's footprint. On this theory the form was influenced in Middle English by association with degree. This explanation dates back to Skeat and Sweet in the late 1800s. The word obviously is of French origin, and pied de gru is the only Old French term answering to the earliest English forms, but this sense is not attested in Old French (Modern French pédigree is from English). Perhaps it was a fanciful extension developed in Anglo-French. Other explanations are considered untenable.

From the Online Etymology Dictionary

76

English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« Last post by rivka on November 28, 2023, 05:21:37 PM »

Huh.

77

English & Linguistics / Re: The random etymology of the day

« Last post by Tante Shvester on November 28, 2023, 04:58:49 PM »

I was thinking about pedigree, and whether the "ped" part was like the food "ped" or the child "pedo", and figuring that it was probably the latter, because of genealogy, but it turns out it as actually the former and pedigree comes from the French "pied de gru" (crane's foot).

78

English & Linguistics / Re: Interesting language stuff

« Last post by Jonathon on November 02, 2023, 08:54:28 AM »

I actually wrote a chapter last year on editors and dictionaries for an edited volume that's coming out next year, and I briefly discussed spellcheckers. I didn't do a super-deep dive into the literature, but I found surprisingly little on that specific topic, so my guess is that nobody's really done any research in that area.

79

English & Linguistics / Re: Interesting language stuff

« Last post by rivka on November 01, 2023, 03:51:41 PM »

I did a ProQuest search and was unable to find anything. I found a few that were about using Word (sometimes with another option as a comparison) as a method to teach various groups of students writing skills and the like.

So either it hasn't been done, or my ProQuest search skills are lacking. Probably both.

80

English & Linguistics / Re: Interesting language stuff

« Last post by Jonathon on November 01, 2023, 01:22:27 PM »

Definitely.