501: casual versus casualty Apr 22, 2016

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A workplace casual-Friday is undoubtedly better than casualty-Friday, but etymologically, there is not the same kind of difference. 'Casual' comes from late Middle English from the Latin, 'casus' which means ‘fallen’ as it used only to mean something that happened by chance or with irregularity (like falling). 'Casualty' is a derivative of 'casual', in the same, older sense of something accidental, and the '-ty'' was added from the pattern of words like 'penalty'.

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