Like a lot of four-year-old boys, my son is fascinated with heavy equipment. Most of those big wonderful machines have names that describe their form or function. Front Loader. Excavator. Dump Truck. It’s easy to see where they came from.
And then there’s Bulldozer. One day, I wondered how that name came about.
Well, that’s…unfortunate. Now every time I use that perfectly innocent word, which is pretty often when you have a machinery-obsessed four year old boy in the house, I have to think of that awful etymology. Gee, thanks, Internet!
What are some other examples of terrible histories lurking behind words that are completely inoffensive today?
All the ones I can think of right now are apocryphal: golf (from gentlemen only, ladies forbidden), picnic (from pick(?) a ni**er), rule of thumb (from the maximum acceptable girth of a stick for beating your wife).
Assassin comes from an Islamofascist group that would go on Jihad while high on hashish. Hence, hashishins.
The mineral amethyst is literally from the Greek a-methys, or “anti-wine”. There was a belief that wearing an amethyst amulet could keep you from getting drunk.
The Ancient Greeks considered anyone who did not speak Greek to be a “barbarian”. The term comes from the Greek practice of mocking foreign language speech as “bar bar bar”. In other words, a barbarian is a blah-blah-head.
Don’t worry about political correctness, which is what this smacks of. A word only means what it means in its context and today (and for a century or so) bulldozer means a machine. It makes no difference what it used to mean.
That’s why I said about three times that it is a perfectly innocent word. If you’re not interested in unusual word histories, perhaps you would be happier in a different thread.
QUOTE]n very obstinate cases the brethren were in the habit of administering a “bull’s dose” of several hundred lashes on the bare back.
[/QUOTE]
Ridiculous! This would invariably be fatal, well before “several hundred lashes”. (Probably for the person delivering them, too, from sheer exhaustion.)
Roman law limited lashings to 40 strokes. And the romans knew a bit about whippings.
QUOTE]n very obstinate cases the brethren were in the habit of administering a “bull’s dose” of several hundred lashes on the bare back.
[/QUOTE]
Ridiculous! This would invariably be fatal, well before “several hundred lashes”. (Probably for the person delivering them, too, from sheer exhaustion.)
Roman law limited lashings to 40 strokes. And the romans knew a bit about whippings.
Ridiculous! This would invariably be fatal, well before “several hundred lashes”. (Probably for the person delivering them, too, from sheer exhaustion.)
Roman law limited lashings to 40 strokes. And the romans knew a bit about whippings.
[/QUOTE]
And your point is?
Or were you under the impression that they had an interest in keeping the subject alive?
“discombobulated” has no etymology, it is a word made up from whole cloth, at a time when that was fashionable, and it just caught on. I think “humongous” has a similar sort of origin. No etymology at all can be as interesting as the weird etymologies.
A “filibuster” isn’t originally a US Senator trying to stop a bill. It’s more like, “thug who enters a country to conquer, harass, or profit from adventure.”
I grew up with the colloquial verb “gip,” which I can totally see annoying anyone Rroma.
“Bad” is probably the most common word with a weirdly offensive etymology. There was a word “bæddel” in Old English which meant homosexual or effeminate. At some point people began using it the same way some people now use “gay” as a general term meaning stupid, defective, weak, etc. It then slowly became the standard antonym to “good” in English:
I’m British, and had long imagined that “gip”, to cheat or con, alluded to the people of Egypt. Reason being that in British Empire times, the inhabitants of the more on-the-beaten-track parts of Egypt were seen as tirelessly ingenious in all kinds of enterprises to part from their money, British and other Western folk encountered in their country: in particular, people transiting the Suez Canal. I’d thought “gip” to be a Britishism derived from that: implying some grudging respect for the locals’ skill and dedication re, often, getting visitors’ cash off them and delivering little in return. With the word seemingly being current also in America, though – I suppose that the victims of the slur, must be the Roma.