I was on another thread and got deep into learning about the history of certain words and thought I’d post here. What word history origins / facts do you know?

I’ll start with two that I recently came across:

  • “‘Wer’ (meaning ‘man’) came from Old High German with the Anglo Saxons 1,500 years ago, and was part of Old English. It then became ‘were’ in Middle English and remains as part of werewolf (‘man wolf’) in modern English.” (Source: [email protected])

  • “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])

  • wjrii@lemmy.worldEnglish
    51·
    1 day ago

    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).