1442: rust and rustic Nov 22, 108

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Suffixes can have lots of different meanings, but due to English's history, sometimes they can seem quite random. For instance, '-ic' is a productive adjectival suffix that can be added to nouns like 'artist' and 'artistic', or 'sulfur' to 'sulfuric' (more on this tomorrow). In the case of 'rust' and 'rustic' however, there isn't a relation. 'Rust' comes from a word meaning 'red' and is shared with many other words that relate to clay-like dirt, including 'rubric', but 'rustic' does not. However, while 'rust' was from a Germanic root, 'rustic' comes from the Latin meaning 'countryside', related to 'rural'. It is possibly that these words share a very old derivation, but either way, the appearance in English is only coincidental now.

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