Ask Lemmy

The anal sex sense of the term buggery is etymologically related to the Bulgarian people. I think because Christian Europeans named a deviant sex act after their heathen neighbors who allegedly practiced it, but it might have been the other way around.

Capricious: From earlier caporiccio, from capo +‎ riccio, literally “curly head”. People believed that curly hair was a sign for a capricious and unruly character.

Happy to see etymology discussion. I used to run r/etymology, suspended it during the API debacle as part of the blackout, and got replaced by Reddit and banned by the new mod.

The "were" in "werewolf" also gives us "world" (originally referring to humanity, as in "the epoch of mankind") and also came through Latin, giving us, among other things, "virtue" (as in, the measure of a man, I think), and "virile".

Apron is a fun one. The Latin word for cloth, banner, tablecloth is mappa. It's the same word used in "mappa mundi" meaning map of the world (we contract that to just map now). French often changed Latin m to n, so mappa became nappe, then nape.

English borrowed nape directly for cloth and added it's native diminutive suffix -kin to refer to a small cloth, a napkin.

But there was also a similar diminutive in French - naperon. A cloth to keep your front clean. English borrowed that too, as napron. Then, sometime around the 15th century, "a napron" got mistaken for "an apron" since they sound identical. And that's what we have today. (Source etymonline and others)

“Sculptors in antique Rome could fix mistakes they made by mixing marble dust with wax. If a sculptor was especially gifted and made no mistakes that needed fixing, they would market their art as “sin cera”, which means “without wax”, which is where the word “sincere” comes from.” (Source: [email protected])

Extremely unlikely. Always be careful of etymologies that are just a little too pat. Sometimes they hold up, but more often they're just someone "seeing Jesus in the toast" and then making up some bullshit to justify it.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/sincere

Early 1800's France... Printing presses were very common and flyers and placards were being produced en masse.

The printing presses would make a clicking sound repeatedly. Or, in French "cliché"...

Cliché... a repeated phrase or word that has grown mundane.

Also, working at a flour mill, as I do... If you want the best, purest flour, you get it from the head (start of) the milling process before flakes of wheat bran (the skin of the wheat kernel) can get ground up and mixed with the pure, white flour.

Head of the mill flour is more expensive and aesthetically pleasing but not always necessary.

If you are making breading or pretzels, you are not worried about color or rise, so you buy flour that runs the whole process of the mill. "Run of the mill" flour.

Run of the mill... Average, commonplace

Also there was word wif, meaning female or woman, word wifmann is today woman literally meaning female-human, because mann simply meant human, weremann was man today literally male human

Add e after wif you get wife

The use of the root words chai and tea can be roughly traced to how the leaf was introduced to the language. If the leaf drink came by land, it was generally called chai. If it came by maritime trade, it was more likely to be called té, or tea.

"Decimate" comes from "decimatio," a specific punishment in the Roman army, randomly executing 1/10 of a unit's strength, due to cowardice or some other shameful collective act.

Egregious comes from Latin meaning one with the flock and was used that way until the French started collectively using it sarcastically and the new meaning stuck.

The word "Window" comes from old norse "vindauge", which translates to "wind eye". The old Norse pronunciation is still around in some norwegian dialects, mine included.

The word trivia comes from Latin. In Roman times people would place signs with interesting tidbits about their nearby town where roads meet as a way of luring travellers to their town. Tri means three and via is road. So trivia are useless and entertaing facts originally found at the confluence of three roads.

This is a pretty common one, but, the color orange was named after the fruit. Not the other way around.

I'll borrow this from my contribution to a discussion yesterday, but Shakespeare coined fewer phrases than you'd think, and probably not very many words at all (though certainly more than the average schlub):

Dictionaries source by earliest known written use, and Willy Shakes was a unicorn for that purpose.

He was an upjumped middle-class prodigy from barely a century after the introduction of the printing press, with a mediocre education by the standards of the day, writing prolifically for both popular and elevated audiences. He was also famous enough in his own day to have had his collected works published, and the fact that his reputation exploded after his death ensured those volumes survived. He would have been writing slightly differently from many of his contemporaries, and a much higher amount of what he wrote has survived.

As a further aside, he's one of the best-researched non-noble lives of his era, and the "Authorship question" is the equivalent of History Channel Ancient Aliens "documentaries." It's titillating nonsense put out by snobs who can't fathom that their literary idol was not an elite (while still definitely privileged compared to the truly common person).

The universe was created last Wednesday morning at precisely 7:26 AM Greenwich mean time. It was created with everyone's memories and the whole physical structure of the universe arranged so that things appear much older than they are.

Last Thursday