“Geek” originally referred to wacky carnival performers. Somewhere in the past 20-30 years, it started becoming synonymous with “nerd.” The first time I ever encountered the word was on an episode of “Facts of Life.” (Ok, stop laughing.) One of the girls was trying to break into some clique, and when they didn’t let her in, they referred to her as a geek-ette. They weren’t using it to mean “nerd,” but rather more like “some low-life that we would neeever let into our clique.”
The word symposium originally referred to a drinking party, but now generally suggests an academic conference which is dry in more than one sense of the word.
If we think of Liederkranz at all, we generally think of cheese, but the word literally means “wreath of songs”.
artificial once meant artistically made, not fake.
Except that this only refers to English. Decimatio in Latin referred to the Roman practice of punishing deserting armies by having one soldier out of every ten killed by his compatriots, and had done so many years before English existed.
“Wonderful” used to mean “causing wonderment,” either for good or ill, but now just means “great.”
From Lords and Ladies, by Terry Pratchett:
I’ve heard the story that Queen Elizabeth told architect Christopher Wren that his work was amusing, awful, and artificial - and those were high compliments in the original meanings of the words.
(Amusing had to do with being visited by the muses, I think. Artificial had to do with art, rather than with unnatural.)
It’s a good story, whether it’s true or not.
Not unless he contacted Her Majesty via a medium. :dubious:
Here’s one I learned from “Cash Cab” just last night, one I’d never thought about: the word “trivia” derives from the Latin roots for “three roads”. Apparently, the “trivium” were “the lower division of the seven liberal arts at medieval universities, consisting of grammar, rhetoric, and logic.” Gradually this has evolved into the modern “trivia”, meaning minute factual details, often thought insignificant. But nothing to do with roads.
Splendid!
I’ve mentioned it before when we’ve talked about puns from foreign languages, but “tandem” is literally Latin for “at length”, and that’s how it came to be applied to a bicycle made for two - whence it means one-behind-the-other in a few other applications.
And the upper division of study was the quadrivium – arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Together these were the seven “liberal arts” – “liberal” in the sense that they were studies worthy of a free man who did not have to work for a living. Architecture and medicine were considered for inclusion in the curriculum at some point, but were rejected as being too practical.
A very very religious person in my office once wrote a letter with the word snafu*in it. I tried to tell her the origin of that word with a straight face. I couldn’t do it.
Despite its origins, the word is now used to mean a minor problem
*acronym for Situation Normal All Fucked Up
As Alan Sherman pointed out in his book The Rape of the APE, this was only one of a group of obscene Army terms:
FUBAR = Fucked Up Beyond Al Recognition
JANFU = Joint Army-Navy Fuck-Up
“Back home,” he went on, it was changed to Fouled Up".
And, I might add, it was euphemized in the Private SNAFU cartoons they made as Army training articles.
Seeing as both “verse” and “versus” come from the Latin vertere or versare, “to turn” , it’s probably ironic that the two cousin words are blending back into one. I’ll keep a watch for the usage popping up here, if it hasn’t already.
Back when Netflix was still pay-as-you-go rather than a flat rate per month, I rented the WWII-era “Private Snafu” cartoons from them. One cartoon mentioned not only Snafu, but his brothers Fubar and Tarfu (which I hear stands for “Things Are Really Fucked Up”). But you don’t hear “TARFU” or “JANFU” nearly as much these days as “SNAFU” and “FUBAR”. Or even at all, really.