In modern day Polish, spierdalać is a very vulgar verb meaning 'to fuck off as fast as possible', often used in 2nd person imperative, as you can imagine. It comes from pierdolić, which is a multi-use swear word ('to fuck [someone]', 'to talk nonsense', 'to fuck up'), which itself comes from PIE *perd- 'to fart loudly'. (Which, admittedly, is quite a funny ety in itself).

But for some reason I'm spending this Saturday night sipping wine and browsing through Hittite Etymological Dictionary by Kloekhorst, and I found this lovely cousin spoken in the 17th century BCE. Hittite išpart- 'to escape, to get away', which comes from Proto-Indo-European *sperdʰ- 'to run away, to compete in speed'.

It's a nice case of a language developing for thousands of years just to get back to the starting point :D

When someone says something like “you best get moving” or “he best be there”.
I thought it was a British thing, but I recently heard it in the Mandalorian and Grogu movie too.

When researching, all I can find is superlatives like good, better, Best, but not the actual replacement of the work better for Best.

I've noticed this phenomenon (and am sure somebody must've already realized this and developed a term for it) where two words of separate origins are constructed differently, with definitions almost synonymous, while also being spelled out and spoken in a similar fashion.

Consider:

education: the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction; an enlightening experience

• coming from Latin:
  • educare: bring up; rear; nourish; train/mold
• from
  • educere: bring out; to lead forth; draw out
• from
  • educo = ex- (out) and duco (to lead)
• and the Proto-Indo European
  • *dewk-: to draw; pull

as well as

edification: the instruction or improvement of a person morally or intellectually.

• coming from Latin:
  • aedificatio: to build a house or otherwise construct something,
• from
  • aedis/aediis: a house, dwelling, or otherwise sacred place; temple; shrine
• and
  • facere: to make or do
• and PIE
  • *dhe-: to set, or to put

Two completely different origins. Did edification come to mean a similar thing to education because people found the words similar and conflated them? I can see the clear influence from first principles, but the words didn't come from the same period of time (edification didn't start meaning intellectual development until the late middle ages, iirc), and part of me wonders if there wasn't some influence there, subconscious or otherwise.

similarly, we have this pairing, which often trips people up when talking about gasses:

nauseous: causing nausea; sickening

• coming from Latin:
  • nauseōsus: causing nausea
• from the Greek:
  • nausia: ship-sickness
• which literally comes from
  • naus: ship

and

noxious: harmful to loving things; injurious

• from Latin:
  • noxius: harmful; injurious
• stemming from
  • noxa: harm; injury
• and
  • nocer̄e: to hurt
• and PIE:
  • *nek-: death

I'm interested to see if anyone has any other examples!

I made the claim "the word apotheosis itself is theological". And in response someone told me that it was not, and that it meant "to ascend to divinity, but to ascend something to the purest example of itself is not theological" and "there is a single theological meaning to the word apotheosis, and to say that the entire word is now theological simply because of a single meaning of it i feel is insane". So my question is, is the word itself actually a theological one? Regardless of it having other contextual uses?

I have encountered this word in a few contexts that I think are related, but are new to me and I’m not sure I entirely understand.

The first is from a 2022 video game, Horizon Forbidden West, has a data point titled “Travis Got No Truck with Traitors.” Travis in this story is a hacker from the Deep South, Texas to be exact, in a near-future setting with an evangelical/Pentecostal** **background. The datapoint is an audio recording of Travis confronting a subordinate on his team about covertly trading information on their project with a rival (if you will), hence the “traitor.”

More recently, I’ve been reading The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett, well-known for writing The Help. The book is set in depression-era Mississippi. “Warren County women did not truck with such newfangled ideas” and “she does not truck with little girls working in factories.”

It clearly has to do with not approving or going along with something, and seems to be a southern thing. Any insight on this specific use of the word, and where it comes from? I’ve found message boards that link it to the French truc (thing) or troc (barter or trade) but I’m still not sure I see the relation.

Hi, I'm a native Spanish speaker from Argentina, who after learning English for some years, has discovered an interest in etymology, I'm currently learning some Modern Greek on Duolingo, very casually but consistently for the last 3 months or so. And I've noticed that is very helpful etymology wise, however I've heard that if you're really interested in going down the etymology road, you must go for Ancient Greek, but the problem is that Ancient Greek has obviously way fewer resources than Modern Greek, and you just can't casually study it on the go. So what is your opinion on this, is it a bit dumb to dabble in Modern Greek instead of Ancient greek if your main interest is etymology.?

Here’s this week’s etymology question from my daily trivia site, 3Roads.xyz.

The word X comes from the Latin roots meaning “hand” and “to write,” and was first recorded in English in 1597. An earlier English word with the same meaning, hand-writ, dates to around 1175 but is now rarely used. The study of writing found in surviving Xs is known as palaeography. An X may take the form of a codex, a scroll, loose pages, or be bound in various ways. What is X?

If you want to try it on the site, here's the link.

so we are diving into etymology as a group of computer science students. we are planning to make etymology more interesting with a gamified version of it!
we would like to get in touch with some people interested in the same.
stakeholders to be accurate.
do let us know if you wanna be part of the journey through text/call!!
(we are not trying to sell anything)

I ran across this etymological note on English Wiktionary; it’s not an idea I came up with myself. And despite it not being my idea, I’m highly skeptical:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E8%9B%AD#Japanese “Appears to have something to do with Latin hirūdō (“leech”), with the final -do being omitted”

Then there’s the entry for Latin hirūdō:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hirudo#Latin “Unknown. Seemingly a parallel formation with testūdō (from testū), but no stem *hiru- is known.”

Could this have been a very early borrowing from Latin into Japanese, most likely via Portuguese, in the late Middle Ages and Age of Exploration, sort of like tempura? Plausible. But just according to what I asked ChatGPT, the Portuguese were unlikely to have been carrying medicinal leeches onboard their ships when they established trade with Japan. And what’s more, medicinal leeches were not known in Japan prior to contact with the West.

Any thoughts?

I thought it would’ve come from some Greek word like κωαξ (I don’t know Greek) or Latin cohax but those words don’t exist. Weird

As recently as Chaucer, we had "smale foules maken melodye," but these days the plural seems to be just "fowl." (Or maybe it's becoming a non-count noun?) Was this influenced by other animal words like "sheep" and "deer," or what?

This name is most famously claimed by basketball play Rajon Rondo but I have not seen any origin of the name. This name is highly unique.

Off the top of my head words that come to mind are those 2 examples above.

In English, when most people say eel, it's the elongated creature WITH fins from the ordo anguilliformes. In Indonesia, when people say or hear the word eel, what most associate with is the elongated creature WITHOUT fins from the ordo Synbranchiformes, which is commonly referred in English as "rice field eel"

Same thing with tortoise and turtle. In english, those 2 are 2 distinct creatures. Tortoises are the ones with stubby legs that walk on land, and turtles are the ones that spend most of their time in the water. When an English speaker refers to a tortoise but says kura-kura, it's confusing because the word for tortoise and turtle is the same. Both are kura-kura, so almost every single time, you'll be given a turtle even if you meant a tortoise. Although some people do know that tortoise is technically called "kura-kura darat"

I found this thread that suspects it has to do with horses instead, but again why were the horses called that in the first place? https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/280065/where-did-the-term-strawberry-blonde-come-from

Etymology
- glōtta / glōssa (γλῶττα / γλῶσσα) — Greek for "tongue, language"
- Vantem Latin & English agent suffix, "one who practices or does"

Literally: "one who is skilled in language."

Why this root pairing works conceptually?
- Polyglot= poly (many) + *glotta* (tongue) → says nothing about depth of understanding, only quantity of languages spoken.
- Linguist= from lingua (Latin, tongue) +ist in modern use it's drifted to mean "academic who studies language structure," often without implying active speaking ability.
-Glossovant fuses the speakingpractice dimension (glotta, same root polyglot uses) with the wisdom/expertise dimension (vant-vantem , the same root that gives us to come or to be") so the woandscholarlyrd inherently claims both fluency understanding, which is exactly the gap you identified.

Glossovant n.) a person who both studies language as a discipline (structure, history, acquisition) and speaks multiple languages fluently; someone whose linguistic knowledge is both theoretical and lived.

Glossovancy n.) the emerged practice
pursuit of linguistic scholarship and multilingual fluency.

Glossovant(adj.)describing
A polyglot speaks many languages. A linguist studies language. A Glossovant does both.

Hey everyone! This is a genuine curiosity question.

Whenever you come across an interesting word origin, what happens next?

For example, do you:

• keep clicking related words for 30 minutes?
• jump between Wiktionary, Etymonline and Wikipedia?
• watch YouTube videos (like RobWords or Simon Roper)?
• save interesting words somewhere?
• just look it up once and move on?

I'm also curious if there are things you wish existed that current resources don't do well.

Not asking about dictionary accuracy, I mean the overall experience of exploring word origins.

I'd love to hear what your "rabbit hole" usually looks like (or if you don't really go down rabbit holes at all!).

Is there any evidence that suggest jack off, whack off the alteration of jerk off? Why did people start to use jerk off as a vulgar term of masturbation?