Why is etymology cool?

2023.11.16 - 21:31 Status: Tags:

• Words are pretty dang cool. “Tradition being blessings from the past” is cool, but what about words given to us? If words are specific thoughts thought of before and deemed worthy enough to be visited again, then people came up with a term for a thought so that they could remember what thought to come back to it at some point.
• A super interesting thing is that when you start looking at Etymology you see just how many thoughts aren’t necessarily new, but have been thought about for a very, very long time.
• What were the first words?

Examples

• I like the word “camaraderie” because the root word is the word “camera”; which in Latin means “room”. The sense of “camaraderie” thus gives us “those you’ve shared a room with”.
  • This is particularly strong for me with different languages, and especially Music. If you’ve spent a certain amount of time studying Chess then we have common thought patterns that we “just know” the other person has thought of.
  • One of my favorite things about the band Car Bomb is that what they play is so complex that it’s not an accident that they hit the right notes and the same time altogether. They’re thinking the exact same thoughts and know exactly what the others are thinking as well. That is camaraderie. That’s multiple people you can look at and know what’s going on in their head. (Maybe it’s the absence of deception that makes this so refreshing. Not sure.)
• The obsolete sense of the title “manager” is really sweet. First, the root of “manager” comes from the Latin “manus” which means “the hand”; from Wiktionary there’s the sense of “To treat with care; to husband.”