332: sophisticated Nov 5, 2015

-
'Sophisticated' has changed meaning over time. In late Middle English, this word meant ‘adulterated’ (adjectivally) and (verbally) ‘mix with a foreign substance’. In medieval Latin, 'sophisticatus' meant ‘tampered with’. The shift of denotation of the word probably occurred first in the adjective, 'unsophisticated', changing from ‘uncorrupted’ from ‘innocent’ to ‘inexperienced, uncultured’.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

1511: "I'll be home in 3 days; don't wash" Might be False Jan 31, 2019

-
Image
Check out the latest podcast on the Patreon for as little as $1: • It is very easy for misinformation to spread so long as there is a grain of truth to it, such as the line of ' let them eat cake ', which was probably never said by Marie Antoinette. Another such disputed quote is "I return in 3 (or 5 or 8) days; don't wash" said by Napoleon to his wife Josephine. This quote is more likely to have been written than that attributed to Antoinette as he did often write her love letters, but many of the original lines from which the now-famous quote could have been drawn are often contradictory or not so reliable.
Continue »

1509: Right-to-Left Lyrics in Sheet Music Jan 29, 2019

-
Although there are many frustrations of writing in a non-Latin-based script in todays world, as discussed in the last two posts, but this is not only true of digital media. When it comes to writing music, which is traditionally written left-to-right, this poses a problem for those who write lyrics in a writing system does not follow that pattern. What people who write with Hebrew characters tend to do is to break up the word into syllables; each syllable is written right-to-left but the whole line is written left-to-right. However, those who write with Arabic letters—which by itself is a significantly larger population by up to hundreds of millions—will often, though not always, instead write the notes and every other musical notation right-to-left. See the last related two posts here: CrazyFont Arabizi Support Word Facts on Patreon here: Patreon.com/wordfacts
Continue »

681: termite Oct 19, 2016

-
It might be easy, even for those with mighty brain-power, to assume that 'termites' are a type of mite. There are ordinarily plenty of words which can't act as their own words, but still attach to other words, e.g. a 'cran' is not a type of berry even though we have 'cranberry'. This would be an example of what is called a "bound morpheme", and the sure only way to know that 'ter-' is not one is to look it up. In fact, while 'mite' comes from Old English, 'termite' comes from Latin, or you could also look and see that their scientific names are completely different. Termites are also sometimes called, 'white ants', but this is equally misleading.
Continue »