Word Origins

It’s not I who have twisted the meanings of the words, it’s the people who use the word amateur when they mean hack. The word amateur is very old, and for most of its history [1] it literally meant lover and in the case of practitioners of some art or sport, it meant those who participate out of love for the activity, not for money. [1] https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/amateur

I had to look up [1] the etymology of "moonshot" and thought it was interesting. moon shot, n.2 One might think, “1961, moon shot;” this word relates to the space program as this is the year that President Kennedy set out the great challenge to go to moon by the decade’s end, but it doesn’t, at least not directly. The space term dates to 1949. This moon shot is baseball jargon for a ball hit to a great height. But it’s still 1961, so the baseball usage could be a figurative use of the space term, but the type of hit was made famous by L. A. Dodger Wally Moon. Undoubtedly the coinage is something of a double entendre, combining Moon’s name with the astronautic term, but it shows that in etymology the obvious answer isn’t always the right one. [1] http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/1961_words/

It isn't that well defined. To start with, which opinions? I may disagree with your (hypothetical) opinion that Go is the best language developed so far. I would not call you "bro" because of that, even if you were a non-obese male. Bro in this context refers to "tech bro' oligarchs" (https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/broligarchy dates the popularity starting last month). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brogrammer notes that '"Brogrammer" or "tech bro"' are "often used pejoratively to describe toxic masculinity and sexism in the technology industry". This definition highlights how it's not merely 'opinions with which I disagree', but a specific set of opinions. FWIW, The Atlantic is the publication which brought us the term "Bernie Bro", "to describe young, white, progressive men who, in his view, support unrealistic progressive policies and promote the Bernie Sanders campaign obnoxiously", including "sometimes attack in very sexist ways" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Bro The connection there is the toxic masculinity and sexism.

It's the “agency of societies” that helped English lose its gendered nouns. One theory is that Old English society found them useless because there was overlap between endings, causing noun ending inflection to “collapse” into a single neutral form, which started in the North of England and progressed to the South.[1] Societal changes are already influencing gendered nouns in Germany[2]. Some dialects of German (Niederdeutsch) also use de instead of der/die. I'm a British national living in Austria. I've spoken with Austrian natives about the difficulty of learning German noun genders who admit that it feels increasingly old fashioned to them. The local dialect here slurs some noun endings so it's almost ambiguous, just as Old English once did. There's no place for reinforcement of gender stereotypes via language (it is hard to find gender-neutral phrases in German - you are either a male programmer or a female one). Two languages that gender the same noun differently also have societies that use a different class of adjective (feminine vs masculine) for the word.[1] To me it seems entirely reasonable to call gendered nouns “useless”, and to see them as a burden on a language and a society. [1]: Lexicon Valley's episode on how English lost its genders is worth listening to: https://overcast.fm/+Noxtqh7oc. Dave Wilton's analysis is also interesting: http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/loss_of_gender_in_e… [2]:…

The given origins for these phrases seem to be considered a modern myth: https://grammarphobia.com/blog/2019/07/a-pot-to-piss-in.html https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/piss-poor-pot-to-piss-in

Those swiving historians! https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/fuck

In light of this, the whole thing about "Pumpernickel" meaning "pain pour Nicol" (where Nicol is a horse) (1) makes a bit more sense. I don't mean that it's necessarily true, just that it's a less of an absurd, nonsensical claim. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/pumpernickel/ https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/pumpernickel

There's really no good "reason" here, and people keep making up superfluous descriptions, like the whole deal about ordinal baseball diamond orientations. Or, in boxing, how the southpaw stance has the left hand below ("south") the right. The real answer appears to be that "south" merely means "opposite" and "paw" means—of course—"hand".[1] [1] http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/southpaw

The article on wordorigins.org contains more information, including this quote: Use of southpaw to mean the left hand goes back all the way to 1813, long before baseball, as we know it today, existed. It’s used in a letter appearing in the Philadelphia newspaper The Tickler on 30 June of that year: “Luk here mon, and convince yourself,” said he, holding up the Tickler, in the right paw, between the ceiling and the floor, and with the south paw pointing to the “bow, vow, vow.” (Source - http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/southpaw/)

Original sense was a bomb big enough to blow up a city block. See http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/more/173/

> The origin of the word "sin" as most people use it today is a word from archery. It means hitting the target but missing the center. This page (which gives the OED as a source) says that's true of the Greek hamartia (often translated as "sin") but not of the English word itself: http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/trespass_sin_debt/

http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/dongle/ http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=dongle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongle interesting to see the various origins and definitions.

I actually think that in this case the word trolling is more appropriate. If Charles River were "trawling" they would be conducting an extensive search to look for what they want. If they are "trolling," they are using bait to see what comes along. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(angling) http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/forums/viewthread/440/ But, I hadn't actually heard the word "trawling" before -- thanks.

I recall from an article in Time a while back, the Southern American accent is the most authentic representative of the pre-revolutionary war accent. It may very well be that Time reported that, as I have read that statement in various places, but I have also read disagreements with that statement. http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/more/886/ http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=380983 http://thelibrary.springfield.missouri.org/lochist/periodicals/ozarksw… http://books.google.com/books?id=ia5tHVtQPn8C&pg=PA126&lpg=PA1… It's actually rather unlikely that any current dialect of American English has any strict correspondence to the various dialects that were spoken in America at the time of the Revolution.