The giant panda (or panda bear) was originally called the “particolor bear.” Then, naturalists, noticing some similarities to another critter known as the panda, decided that it wasn’t a bear at all, but a relative of the panda. This resulted in the renaming of the particolor bear to “giant panda,” and the “panda” to the “lesser panda” or “red panda.”
Then, 100 years later, they realized. . . Oops! We had it right the first time! Shazam! It really is a bear!
(The word “panda” itself appears to be the local name for the red panda, and I have no idea what it means in that “local” language.)
My favorite one of these is R.I.P., which didn’t originally stand for “Rest In Peace” in English, but the Latin equivalent of this, “Requiescat in pace”.
“Old Norse skita, Old English scitan, etc., the regular Germanic verb, and the corresponding noun, etc., originally ‘separate’ (as in Latin excrementum, from cernere ‘separate’, cognate to Greek crino ‘separate, judge’, Old English sceran ‘cut, shear’, etc, also Sanskrit apa-skara- ‘excrement’), cognate to Lithuanian skeisti ‘separate, divide’, Latin scindere, Greek schizo ‘split’, etc., from Indo-European skei-d- beside Irish sceithim ‘vomit’, Gothic *skaidan *‘separate’, etc.”
Sorry, but even upon my third re-read of your post, I don’t see anything about vomitoriums not being used for vomiting. All I see is your reference to the etymology.
OK, since this one has been bumped:
The word “torpedo” entered the language as the name of the electric ray. (At the time, ‘electric’ had not yet been coined.) “Torpedo” has the same origins as “torpor” and referred to the numbing feeling that they caused, which would later be found to be electric in origin.
From there, “torpedo” evolved to mean (sea-based) mines. (“Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!”)
The spar-mounted bomb attached to the CSS Hunley was also described as a 'torpedo."
Somewhere along the way, and probably by WW I, the word “torpedo” was dropped in favor of “mines,” and “torpedo” was then used pretty much exclusively to describe the self-propelled water-based projecticle that we all know and love.
Well, there was a small side-track to the Bangalore torpedo. I recall seeing some war movie where people were drawing numbers or something to determine who would be on the “relay” team to install the next segment as each relay member was gunned down.
FWIW, the “actually” to me implied that the previous paragraph wasn’t the actual meaning of the word, and that what was being presented after the “actually” was. Otherwise, the “actually” serves no purpose.
Just on the strength of the assertions, the plausibility seems to be a toss-up. Trivium does have both those meanings – ‘the streets’ in antiquity and then in Medaeval times ‘the first three liberal arts’. I can see the term arising out of either of those senses, so what else besides competing assertions do we have?
Robert Hughes, who wrote the book I’m reading, must be a fan of this sort of thing. This morning I read that “car” and “carpenter” both come from the Latin word for a common two-wheeled cart. Back then, when your car (carpentum) broke down on the famous Roman roads, you’d call for a carpenter (carpentarius), not a mechanic.
Actually, it was quite common for Celtic words to pass into Latin after the point that Rome ruled much of what’s now France, which was then inhabited by Celtic speakers. Many such words came into Latin through Roman soldiers serving there, and later many of those soldiers were in fact born there. Etymological dictionaries will often speak of such words being borrowed into “Vulgar Latin,” which just means that you won’t see those words in formal writing of the first century A.D. (approximately). Such words slowly became part of standard Latin though, so within a couple of centuries they were standard over all the area where Latin was spoken, and now they are common in Romance languages. English actually has several dozen words that went from Celtic to Vulgar Latin to Late Latin to French to English.
It’s not really true that “car” was derived from “carpenter.” It’s sort of the other way around. “Carrus” was a Latin word borrowed at some point from Celtic. Eventually it ended up in English as “car.” “Carpenter” also came from a Celtic root apparently, probably the same root as “car.” “Carpentum” meant a vehicle in Latin. There was a derivative of it that meant maker of vehicles. Later this word meant one who could build things, and later it just meant someone who built things in wood. So this was another example of the Celtic to Vulgar Latin to Late Latin to French to English path.
One way to detect that someone who speaks Spanish is from Spain is how often we use the word vale, meaning “OK”, “I hear you”, “gotcha” or, if inquiring, “do you agree/understand?”
The last word in El Quijote is vale, but it’s not there because Cervantes was satisfied with his book: it’s because he used a writing style more direct (and, while not epistolary, more similar to how one would write letters) than the novels of chivalry he was mocking; in this case vale is a word of Latin origin which was used to close letters.
The Spanish is luna de miel. What you came up with sounds in Spanish like moon hunny would sound in English.
I’m lost. So many of these don’t sound convincing, have been proven incorrect, or are just doubted, that I have decided not to believe any of them, as that seems the safest approach.
“Mammoth” as an adjective means “large,” like the extinct beast. However, the word comes to English by way of the local (far-flung Russian Empire) language word for “earth” (as in the ground, not the planet).
It was believed by the locals that, since the bones had been dug from the earth, that it must have been a burrowing critter–just a very large one.