Author Topic: The random etymology of the day (Read 237939 times)

pooka · « **Reply #325 on:** September 15, 2006, 09:28:29 AM »

Maybe Bonnie it is short for Bonita.

Porter · « **Reply #326 on:** September 17, 2006, 02:20:37 PM »

Idiot, idiom, and idiomatic.

Jonathon · « **Reply #327 on:** September 17, 2006, 02:45:22 PM »

Those all trace back to the Greek idios, meaning "private, own, peculiar." Idiot originally meant "private person," meaning a common person—someone without specialized knowledge or education. An idiom is a form of speech peculiar to a particular region or people, and an idiosyncrasy is a peculiar character trait. Syncrasy means "mixed together" and refers to the hypothetical four humors that influenced temperament.

Porter · « **Reply #328 on:** September 17, 2006, 04:39:02 PM »

Huh. My History of Civilization professor was full of crap then.

Jonathon · « **Reply #329 on:** September 17, 2006, 04:45:27 PM »

Why? What was his explanation?

Porter · « **Reply #330 on:** September 17, 2006, 06:38:37 PM »

Well, he said that the original meaning of idiot was somebody who was so unique, so, shall we say, idiosyncratic, that they didn't really have a place in society. So an idiot would probably either be some kind of hero or some kind of loser.

Tante Shvester · « **Reply #331 on:** September 25, 2006, 01:52:25 PM »

"Awning." It looks like a gerund, but it's not a gerund. It's a strange little word, and I wonder how it got here.

Jonathon · « **Reply #332 on:** September 25, 2006, 02:10:55 PM »

According to the OED, nobody knows where it came from. But the -ing is almost certainly a gerundial ending; we usually think of gerunds as simply verbal nouns, but they can also be used to name things that perform an action. Frosting on a cake is something that frosts, and an awning is presumably something that awns (though nobody knows where "awn" comes from).

Benito Mussolini · « **Reply #333 on:** September 26, 2006, 11:03:04 AM »

Pretense and pretend?

Jonathon · « **Reply #334 on:** September 26, 2006, 11:19:15 AM »

Um . . . they're related, and they ultimately come from Latin. I'm not sure what else you want to know.

pooka · « **Reply #335 on:** September 26, 2006, 11:24:10 AM »

Like offend and offense. But I'm also not sure how they reached the form they have in English.

Porter · « **Reply #336 on:** September 26, 2006, 11:30:53 AM »

What latin word do they come from?

Jonathon · « **Reply #337 on:** September 26, 2006, 11:34:38 AM »

Prætendere, meaning "to hold before."

Porter · « **Reply #338 on:** September 26, 2006, 11:35:18 AM »

How do you get from that to pretend and pretense?

Jonathon · « **Reply #339 on:** September 26, 2006, 11:46:40 AM »

Change the spelling to reflect a change in pronunciation in French, and you get pretendre; lose the infinitive ending, and you get pretend.

Pretense comes from the past participle form, prætentus. The last /t/ then assimilated with the final /s/, I believe, giving prætensus. Same thing with pretend—update the spelling and lose the ending, and voila.

pooka · « **Reply #340 on:** September 26, 2006, 11:59:44 AM »

Do you mean the meaning of "hold before?" "Hold" is kind of a broad term in latin. We also get intend, distend, ostensible, tentative, tenacious, tenable... It's more the
"Hold" in "We hold these truths to be self evident" than "Hold this for me, will you?" The former means something like "believe" only stronger.

Porter · « **Reply #341 on:** September 26, 2006, 12:03:01 PM »

Jonathon -- I didn't mean "How do we get from Prætendere to pretend?"

I meant "How do we get from "to hold before" to pretend?"

Jonathon · « **Reply #342 on:** September 26, 2006, 12:17:19 PM »

Ah. For one thing, that's not the only meaning of prætendere—just the most literal translation. The other meanings given in the OED are "to stretch forth, hold before, put forward, allege, pretend." It's not that big of a jump from putting forth or professing to outright feigning.

Jonathon · « **Reply #343 on:** September 27, 2006, 12:20:14 PM »

elbow

This comes from the Old English elnboga (the modern German equivalent is ellenbogen, so you can see the relation). It traces back to the Proto-Germanic word *alino-bogon, which is a compound of *alinâ, meaning "arm" or more specifically "forearm," and and *bogon, meaning "bending." This is the same word that gives us bow with all of its various meanings.

*Alina is cognate with the Greek olena and Latin ulna, which also mean "forearm." We now use the Latin word to refer to the large inner bone of the forearm.

Porter · « **Reply #344 on:** September 27, 2006, 12:21:45 PM »

Thank you. Very awesome.

Brinestone · « **Reply #345 on:** September 27, 2006, 12:36:49 PM »

Cool! I did think that bogen had to have something to do with bending because the German word for "to bend" is biegen. I hadn't thought that the various bows were things that bend, though.

rivka · « **Reply #346 on:** September 27, 2006, 02:34:08 PM »

Quote

elbow

This comes from the Old English elnboga (the modern German equivalent is ellenbogen, so you can see the relation).

The last name Katzenellenbogen means "cat's elbow"

Jonathon · « **Reply #347 on:** September 27, 2006, 02:48:47 PM »

So it would seem.

rivka · « **Reply #348 on:** September 27, 2006, 04:23:48 PM »

Apparently the last name is originally a place-name.

People give places the WEIRDEST names!

Jonathon · « **Reply #349 on:** September 27, 2006, 04:30:34 PM »

I know! And what's weirder still is that cats don't even have elbows—they have knees.