693
Living language (lemmy.world)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/memes@lemmy.world
325 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 35 points 11 months ago (9 children)

This is real and actually quite interesting to look at the history of. For example, the word "Decimate" IIRC was originally defined as killing one for every ten people of a group of people. Now, its used as a term for high impact destruction.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • hideshow 9 child comments
    •
  • [–] 28 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    My usual example is manufacture — to make by hand, but it's more commonly used now to mean machine manufactured and made by hand is called handmade.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 3 child comments
    •
  • [–] 20 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    That's a good one. In school they had me memorize a novel of Latin root words, which is where things can get frustrating. You take a word and piece together the meaning, only to find out the definition has changed so drastically over the years that the root words are now nonsense. Both of our examples fit this description.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •
  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago

    Yeah, I'm prone to go down rabbit holes looking at the etymology and origin of related words for hours. Latin was one of my favorite classes in high school. It's great for world building and stylizing prose when writing fiction.

    Sometimes the etymology is just weird because the current meaning is from an abbreviation of a phrase and the roots don't make sense in isolation, such as perfidious, from the roots per fidem "through faith" but its meaning is from the larger phrase "deceiving through faith."

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    It was originally killing 1 in every 10 by lot. In other words, not in battle, but as a collective punishment of a unit 1 in 10 soldiers would be randomly selected and killed.

    1 in 10 soldiers dying in a battle doesn't sound all that bad. But, 1 in 10 soldiers being selected to be killed as a form of punishment for the unit sounds a lot worse.

  • permalink
  • fedilink
  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment
    •