Pit:
A hole in the ground
The stone found in a fruit
To strive one against another
If we can accept Scots words, then “Gin” (pronounced with a hard “G”}, also means “if”. Some may be familiar with the beautiful traditional Scottish song “O, Gin I Were a Baron’s Heir” .
Are the various meanings of right from different sources?
- A direction
- Politically conservative
- Freedom to do something- Right to vote
- A type of whale
- Correct
To be nitpicky-annoying: I gather that (4) might be reckoned a subset of (5). The old-time whalers called the “right whale” by that name, because it was easier to catch and process, than other whale species – thus, it was the correct / most advisable kind of whale to pursue.
Not even a :smack: from me, but a :eek: because a small intellectual but a major experiential supposition of mine for thirty years has been overturned a :rolleyes: and a little :mad: at myself for repeating that memory of small intellectual supposition and my humorous and wise correction of it all that time.
ETA: Jesus, now I learn I’ve been pronouncing “lathe” wrong my entire life (“th” like in “this”).
For what it’s worth – for my whole life, I’ve been pronouncing it the same. In the UK where I live, I’ve always heard the word pronounced with “th” as in “this” – never, ever, to rhyme with “faith”.
Easy there, Leo … I don’t think you have in fact been pronouncing it wrong … my comparison with “faith” was more to indicate the vowel sound. The “th” is in fact pronounced like the “th” in “this”.
The political sense of left and right came from the hand/direction sense – in IIRC a 18th century French political assembly, the conservatives sat on the physically right-hand side of the room.
And, apparently, the right hand was called that because it was the correct one, and the Bill of Rights sense of right also came from the root meaning more or less ‘correct’.
I suspect that the meaning of a ‘post’ on the SDMB comes from ‘to post’ as in to make publicly known (particularly with a sign), which comes from the idea of putting up a sign on a pole or post in the ground.
However, it looks like military ‘post’ (which gives both hitching post and all the mail-related meanings) actually has a completely different derivation. So two unrelated meanings there.
How about the meaning of “post” as “subsequent”?
“American poetry post the 1950s hasn’t had the same impact”
Well, thank God for small favors.
I actually have had good relations with all my English teachers, and none have been either of my parents, who as far as I know didn’t make me neurotic (about language, at least). So that can’t be the reason I’m so gobsmacked about “lather.”
And, as a friendly get-along American, it behoved me to use the unnatural word “gobsmacked.”
As an aside, on Sunday my church sang a hymn which actually does place “lathe” as being a rhyme for “faith”. Kind of funny, seeing it there in the book, when we’d just been discussing it here.
Ooh, on-line sources seem to say that’s direct from Latin (‘post’=‘after’), so I think that’s a third unrelated meaning.
We may have a winner!
We’ve already had several “winners”, although you have to pick them out from all the non-winners, which means looking up etymologies.
One is tick, which as I posted above, has 4 unrelated meanings. So the real winner should be the word with the most unrelated meanings. And by unrelated, I mean etymologically unrelated.
I hope I keep doing this because I think it’s interesting the way word meanings evolve, and not just because I enjoy crushing people’s dreams, but to ‘pit’ one creature against another comes from a cock-fighting ‘pit’ or other hole where you throw in two animals to fight against each other.