Tell us why we should unexpectedly come to love your hobby.

    • the dopamine fiend@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Vodka.

      Take the Russian word for “water,” essential for survival and comfort, and convert it to the diminutive case, indicating something even more precious to you than life itself.

      Words always mean things.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Not a specific word, but it’s fascinating to me how, because of the Norman invasion in 1066, fancier words are of French origin and lower-class words are Germanic. So the animal is a cow, but we eat beef (boeuf) and the animal is a pig, but we eat pork (porc). Chicken was something even the poor ate, so it didn’t change.

      • fubo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        There are other funny things going on in animal names.

        A “chicken” is a young “cock”, just as a “kitten” is a young “cat”.

        And a “rabbit” was a young “coney” — which rhymes with “honey”.

        But folks got prudish and they didn’t want to talk about cocks and coneys in front of the kids, so words like “chicken” and “rabbit” took over.


        Meanwhile over at the pig farm, how does a farmer call a hog?

        They holler “Soo-ee!”, right?

        They’re speaking Latin. That’s “Sui!” — the vocative form of “sus”, Latin for pig. Folks have been talking to their pigs in Latin for a long, long time.

    • ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      Gotta love cacaphony. I never thought about it until I learned the word euphony, which means “good sounding” from the Greek eu (good) and phone (sound).

      You can see where this is going, right?

      So the Greek kakos means bad, but is cognate with the Latin cacere (to defecate), the word from which we get the informal –if slightly outdated– euphemism “caca” for shit, crap, doodoo.

      So cacaphony, sure, means “bad sounding” but also in a very real sense means “sounds like shit”.


      As a bonus, when I was learning Latin, I was delighted to discover the names Miranda and Amanda mean respectively, literally, good lookin’ and good lovin’.

    • 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      Not a single word but equestrian and horse being closely related and both decended from krsos (if you say it out loud you can hear the similar to both horse and latin equs)

    • jantin@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      One which you won’t be able to unlearn: “Kid” as a word for a child derives from a word “kid” which meant young goat. We’re literally calling human children “goat children” and it’s not even mocking.

      The same thing happened in Swedish, the common word meaning “boy” or “guy” - “kille” is a shortened “killing” - young goat.