It wasn’t abundantly clear in the OP which particular sense of ‘funny’ he wanted an unabiguous word for.
I propose: Mirthful.
Since others the thread seems to have taken that post at face value, let me note that it was Joe Pesci’s “You think I’m funny?” scene from Goodfellas.
Well done.
All words (with some rare exceptions) have an etymology. They didn’t start out meaning what they mean now, and in a few decades or a few centuries they will mean something else. You can’t have a word whose meaning stays the same with something as culturally bound as the idea of humor. Perhaps there are some very specific, very universal terms that tend not to change in the history of languages, but as a general rule every word’s meaning in language changes over time.
ROTFLMFAO
LOL!!!111
lolz
and
I can’t see much change in the history of my suggestion (mirthful) - it’s a descendant of words meaning (and sounding like) ‘merry’.
merry
O.E. myrige “pleasing, agreeable,” from P.Gmc. *murgijaz, which probably originally meant “short-lasting” (cf. O.H.G. murg “short,” Goth. gamaurgjan “to shorten”). Connection to “pleasure” is likely via notion of “making time fly”
–Online Etymology Dictionary
I agree with Wendell Wagner and others-- if you go back far enough, all words probably emerged from the sort of figurative usage that led to “merry”. Maybe the only exceptions would be very fundamental words like “me” and “dad”.
Negative Lite wins
lulz
Fair enough - I just didn’t find that one in my searches.
This is the OP’s answer.
Compare it to the porcelain fixture that you use for elimination of urine and feces -
“Toilet” - originally meant a towel wrapped around the shoulders for hairdressing, then meant the whole process of hairdressing, then meant the table and mirror used for hairdressing, then meant the whole process of getting dressed
“Lavatory” - refers to the washbasin, not the toilet
“Water Closet (W.C.)” - refers to the tank used to store water for flushing
“Commode” - originally referred to a piece of furniture, a low cabinet, one which was often used to store a chamber pot
And so on …
So by going through all the etymology, you could conclude that English has no word for toilet.
Here is the Swadesh list of 200 words (well, actually, meanings of words) that tend to be fairly stable in languages:
This entry also gives the Swadesh-Yakhontov list of 35 words that tend to be really stable. Other than these sorts of words, though, it’s untypical to find words that have stable meanings in any language. We can expect words to be slowly changing in meaning over the decades and centuries as a general rule. Languages are not stable things.
Sorry – in my family, we use that word to mean “of or relating to rafrels”.
Read my post in a Joe Pesci voice then try again.
You’re not gonna like hysterical, I’m guessing.
I should have added the following to my last post: The words in the 200-word list given in the link in that post aren’t completely stable either. You can expect about 20% of them to change in meaning (or just drop completely out of the language) over a period of 1000 years. Even the words in the shorter 35-word list aren’t completely stable. You can expect something like 5% or 10% of them to change in meaning (or drop out of the language) over a period of 1000 years. Words generally change meanings in languages faster than you might expect.
Dude, that’s not even close.
I don’t think that’s correct - I believe the water closet is the S Bend - trapping water, closing off the soil pipe, preventing the ingress of noxious gases.
Laughable?
“Laugh” goes back to a Indo-European word meaning just “make a sound.”