I try to remember these but often when I need one I can only think of sincere and salary, both of which are fairly common knowledge, so I’ll use those.
Sincere is from the Latin meaning “without wax” (sine cere) and was used for columns that were flawless (i.e. didn’t have to have their chips and dents replaced with wax or other substances). This origin is disputed, but may have some veracity, but salary is more certain; it’s from salarium meaning salt and was used to refer to the salt allowance allotted to Roman soldiers, now meaning any remuneration provided on a regular basis.
Please give some other examples of words that derive from completely different origins than their current usage. It needn’t be Latin. (The Emmy Awards, for example, are named for theImage Orthicon Tube used in television cameras in the early days of TV, or Brandywine being derived from Branduin in Tolkien.)
Miniature: used to refer to manuscript painting, after a lead oxide pigment from Turkey called minium: so a book could be miniated. The connection with the ‘min’ of minimum, minor, et al meaning ‘smallish’ is purely coincidental and the word originally had none of those connotations, but because of the phoneme coincidence and the fact that these paintings tended to be small, the word migrated.
I have more of these but they need to come to the front of my brain. . . need a drink!
Item is my favorite. It’s Latin for “Also”, because in itemized (hah!) lists written in Latin they’d have
“Also, a chair
Also, a table,
Also, four plates…”
So people started calling each entry in the list an “also”/“Item”.
Another is “Nice”, which originally meant something like “stupid”. You can invoke this by saying of someone you don’t like that you think they’re “Nice”
Awful–something that filled you with awe. Awesome used to mean the same thing as awful. Of course something awesome can be scary, so the meaning of awful started to morph into “terrifying”, and then to mean terrible and then to simply mean really bad.
Villain–used to mean a peasant. The word changed to mean a rude, foolish country bumpkin, and from there to its current meaning.
Lots of names with origins in materials count. You can have a drinking glass made from plastic rather than glass. Or a straw made from paper or plastic rather than straw. Marbles are now made from glass rather than marble.
You dial a phone, even though there are no rotary phones any more.
Cute used to mean intelligent. Like “acute” still means.
It’s more than disputed, it’s not accepted by any authority I’m aware of:
If the OP extends to phrases, my favourite is “there was no love lost between them” which now means the exact opposite of its original meaning. It comes from the original “babes [lost] in the woods” story and meant the [fraternal] love between the children was complete, none was missing.
**Silhouette: ** derived from the last name of a French finance minister, it originally meant something done cheaply. Since a silhouette portrait (cut out of paper) was an inexpensive likeness, they took his name. Now, it means a shadowy outline.
*Turtle: ** originally the name of a bird, named after the sound of its call. After the Norman invasion, the French word “tortue” was used to designate what in English was called “tortoise.” Folk etymology changed “tortue” to “turtle.” The bird was renamed “turtledove.”
*The changing of pronounciation to match an existing word, not an urban legend about a word’s etymology.
We did a GQ thread on the word “check” a while back, during which I was fascinated to learn that all of the myriad modern usages of check, from finance to hockey to fashion, trace back to “check” as an attack on the king in chess . . . which in term comes from the Persian word for “king”, which was later re-borrowed into English as “shah”.
So when they give you a rain check at the ball park, they’re really giving you a rain king. (Cue Counting Crows.)
Character comes from the Greek word kharax, which means pointed stick. You can use pointed sticks to make markings. Those markings can be letters, in other words, characters. Markings can also be made to differentiate an object from another identical one. From there you get character as a distinctive feature, and from there it becomes that which makes a thing what it is. In acting, it is important to identify a role’s character, its defining features. From there, we get character as the role itself. Eventually we end up with character as a fictional persona. So we got from pointy sticks to Hello Kity.
Camera: Latin for “chamber” or “room.” A camera obscura (“dark chamber”) was a Renaissance device for drawing – somebody figured out somehow that if you drill a small hole in the wall of a darkened room, an inverted image of whatever is on the other side of the hole will be projected on the opposite wall; and one can then draw the image by tracing. The word “camera” later was applied to a device for taking photographs, which uses the same principle.
And “checkmate” comes from shah mat – “The king is dead.” (In Russian, chess is called shakhmat.)
Actually, chess was invented in India – but was transmitted to the west via Persia. Just as what we call “Arabic numerals” were invented in India but Europeans learned them from the Arabs.
Similarly, the meaning of “silly” was originally “blessed,” before it drifted to “weak-minded” by way of “pious.”
If The Big Lebowski is a reliable indication, “dude” has wandered far from its original sense of “A man who is very careful about his dress and appearance.”
Any word-nerd worth his salt knows that “salary” ain’t what it used to be, of course.
These days, when an umbrella comes out, the last thing you’re after is a “little shade.”
“Loose-fitting pants” used to by an oxymoron, and “tight pants” was a taut-(heh-heh)-ology.
A “machine” uised to be anything man made, whether or not it “did” anything.
Hardly anybody knows what a “cony” is anymore, but it wasn’t that long ago that “rabbit” was to “cony” as “kid” is to “goat.”
Whew. Nice to get that out without my girlfriend rolling her eyes at me. Thanks, SDMB.
I think my favourite is the use of the word ‘iota’ to mean a small bit. It was actually backtracked from the expression ‘(not) an iota of difference’, in reference to the huge religious schism between the homoousians and the homoiousians (Arians) in early Christianity. As you may notice, there’s an ‘iota of difference’ between the two groups.
Originally if you “prevented” someone’s arrival somewhere, it just meant you got there first (praevenire), not that you then stopped him getting there himself.
According to one of the footnotes in Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens, it also used to mean ‘scrupulously exact’. I realise that’s not the most rigorous of citations, but Pratchett doesn’t usually pull these things out of thin air.