|
Post by Amalcas on Dec 12, 2005 17:24:34 GMT -5
I think it would be interesting to present a challenge for those of us who enjoy wordplay. The rules are simple: I (or someone else) provides a word, and someone else uses other words and their meanings to decipher its meaning (yes, you probably know what it means already, but it makes you think about it). I do this a little when I am bored, and am curious to see if anyone else would enjoy it. I'll give an example first:
Quintessence
Break the word in two, leaving "quint" and "essence." Now I can deal with this: Substituting in synonymous phrases, quintessence is the "fifth true nature." Now this is somewhat boggling. Roll back time, examine what things were once thought to be made of: five elements! In most listings, the fifth element is spirit. So quintessence means the "true nature of the spirit [of the thing]."
Ready to do one? Here's one that caught me up: Demograph I had a third one, but it slipped my mind... :shrug:
|
|
|
Post by teancum79 on Dec 12, 2005 17:57:32 GMT -5
Demograph Demo: to demonstrate or show Graph a chart of picture.
= showing people a picture
(Okay maybe I missed the whole idea, but I needed to get my mind off of my stats final)
|
|
|
Post by littlepea on Dec 12, 2005 19:27:58 GMT -5
ah, i'm a big fan of etymology are you looking for the most commonly accepted etymology, or ones that we make up ourselves which also make sense? demograph comes from greek. "demo" comes from a greek word which is best translated as "clan" or "band", and we get the word "democracy" from the same root since that's how the greeks famously governed themselves (by voting in groups - or "demes" as they were called - to elect their leaders, or something like that). "graph" comes from the greek word meaning to write or scribe or something like that (hence "photograph" is a picture from light, sonograph is a picture from sound). i guess "record" would be a good translation here. my greek vocab is eluding me at the moment (since i only did greek for 1 year, 3 years ago), but if you put this together you get "a record of the clans" - a demograph is a record of births, deaths, and other social changes over time in a specific area. what about sociopath? i've often wondered about the word "barber" in the past as well, since it seems quite similar to the word barbarian. it seems to come from latin since the word "barba" means beard, but there is also the latin word "barbarus" which means barbarian, so i asked my latin teacher (back in school) if they were related - as if all barbarians were beared, since very few roman sculptures depict their subjects as bearded maybe being clean shaven was seen as a sign of sophistication and he agreed that was a distinct possibility ... i've also read in a children's history book that the reason barbarians were called barbarians was because when the romans first came to england they heard the celts speaking and though they sounded like sheep - baa-baa ... bar-bar-ians ... i don't think that was meant as a serious suggestion, though
|
|
|
Post by Amalcas on Dec 12, 2005 20:33:46 GMT -5
Oddly enough, while sculptures often do not depict beards, drawings seem to, so no help there. I had already figured the demo- part (taking from demagogue), but was a little puzzled by graph (that being a noun as well as a verb in english, as we all know ). I guess I forgot that it could be a verb. Sociopath: Socio- is, simply enough, relating to social interaction or society. Using "pathology," -path means disease. A sociopath is, then, one with a diseased/crippled social sense. EDIT: Looking back at Teancum's answer, I find that intriguing. Demograph can arrive at the same meaning via two mutually exclusive methods... Oh, and I do mean the one's we make up ourselves. Just a mental exercise. ;D
|
|
|
Post by littlepea on Dec 12, 2005 20:49:29 GMT -5
oh ok ... i can't just ignore my latin and greek knowledge, of course i often think about words with mixed latin and greek roots - eg. television (tele comes from greek, vision comes from latin) - and wonder what they would be if they had purely latin or purely greek roots. television either becomes finivision or telorama did you know that the Earth is not actually a sphere? it's actually a kind of squashed sphere which is called a "geoid" ... can you tell me why that isn't at all helpful? also, a "kilobyte" isn't 1000 bytes (as kilo would suggest), it's actually 1024 bites - of course everybody knows that, and many people know that the correct word for 1024 is "kibibyte". why do you think kibi means 1024?
|
|
|
Post by littlepea on Dec 15, 2005 11:50:24 GMT -5
is no-one interested in this any more? oh well, i'll answer my own questions anyway, cos i find it that exciting ... the Earth is a geoid - the greek word "gé" means "earth" or "land" and is used for the roots of words like "geology" and "geography", so "geoid" means "earth-shaped" ... so the Earth is earth-shaped ... thanks to whoever coined that word, it really cleared things up ... "kilobyte" means 1000 bytes, since kilo means 1000 (like kilometer and kilogram), though kilobyte is actually 1024 bytes ... the reason they didn't just make a kilobyte 1000 bytes is because with computers they had to program in binary (numbers with base 2 - only using 1 and 0). 1000 is 10^3 (in normal numbers we workd with base 10) - the closest to 1000 in base 2 is 2^10, which is actually 1024. you can represent 1000 in base 2, but it's simpler for the computer to understand (ie. the computer runs faster) if you just use 1024. but this technically isn't a kilobyte, it's a kibibyte - the reason why (i think) is that "kibi" means "1000 in 2s", using the "ki" bit of "kilo" with "bi". i'm not entirely sure where "bi" comes from but we use it in words like "bisexual", "bicycle" etc. to mean 2. so "1000 in 2s" describes 1024 - 1000 with base 2 (or near enough ).
|
|
|
Post by dianaholberg on Dec 28, 2005 10:27:04 GMT -5
bi- is from Latin ( bis) as in bĭennĭum... but seems to date back only as far as the 1600s. It's a confusing prefix in English though, as it can mean "twice" or "every two"... for example: bimonthly1 : occurring every two months 2 : occurring twice a month : SEMIMONTHLY usage see BI-
|
|
|
Post by littlepea on Jan 5, 2006 14:59:35 GMT -5
very good, i've never known that before i asked my latin teacher about it when i was in school and he said it was latin though he didn't know exactly where in latin it came from. if etymology crops up in any of our future conversations i'll be sure to inform him ;D
|
|