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The word “decide” has deadly origins
- scrollaway 5y agoIf people are interested in etymology, I highly recommend the youtube channel Alliterative which goes over etymological connections and teaches history through language. It's a fascinating channel and very unique style of videos. Here's one of my favourites, on colors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaDc5J2LD08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaDc5J2LD08
- alberto_ol 5y agoanother obvious link if you are interested in etymology is https://www.etymonline.com/ https://www.etymonline.com/
- jonplackett 5y agoI love etymonline
- puzzlingcaptcha 5y agoI can't say I liked it. Looks like a loosely-associated bag of trivia, that can trace the words only as far as latin or proto-germanic and then resorts to wild guesses. It skips over associations 'downstream' too, e.g. "Greek word leukos giving us leukemia" - which is a neoplasm of leukocytes (white blood cells) which take their name from a white layer following centrifugation of a blood sample. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffy_coat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffy_coat
- scrollaway 5y agoIt does skip some stuff but I think if it didn't, the video would be several days long, not "just" 50 minutes :) It's definitely a unique style; I think if you don't like it within the first 5-10 mins you won't like the channel at all.
- personlurking 5y ago> I can't say I liked it. Looks like a loosely-associated bag of trivia As a fan of etymology, I'd have to agree. It went so quickly between facts that I didn't recall the previous facts and barely had time to pay attention to the current facts, before it moved on. I'm also not a fan of the layout. One much shorter video focusing on one color would've been a lot better for me, then rinse and repeat. As for the layout, I would have it show the presenter talking while in the top corner the images are shown. Something less visually distracting. My feeling is that etymology-focused content is hard to produce. I've seen several channels or podcasts and they all fall short in a few areas.
- geocrasher 5y agoI always enjoy co-mingling the words etymology and entomology such as can be done with with the word 'bug' as it relates to computing. Some people take it quite alliterally.
- sohkamyung 5y agoA variation of this joke is quite popular in entomology groups: > People who confuse etymology and entomology bug me in a way I can't put into words.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- smurda 5y ago-cide = a killing Suicide, homicide, genocide. Whenever I feel conflicted about a decision I feel like I’m killing an option. It’s a dramatic framework, and probably why I’m not decisive.
- _rpd 5y agoPremature judgements are the root of all evil.
- papito 5y ago1. Sometimes you have no choice but to make one. 2. Analysis paralysis is no joke either.
- mrslave 5y agoDisagree. We clearly benefit from identifying patterns, and statistics is a powerful tool. Do we sometimes misclassify? Sure. But if we stopped to talk to everyone in the city we'd get nothing done.
- BLKNSLVR 5y agoNot relevant in meaning, but relevant for the order of the letters in the word: deicide: The killing of a god
- ithkuil 5y ago"concise" OTOH is not about killing as about cutting off the superfluous
- Acrobatic_Road 5y agoAnd the word elide comes from elidere.
- Agentlien 5y agoSo the end of the Latin word for "cut off" was cut off? That's fitting.
- ben_bai 5y agoInteresting. The german word entscheiden (decide) is also based on scheiden (to part) as in Scheidung (divorce) and dahinscheiden (to die slowly). And even more meanings from the same root-word.
- fbcpck 5y agoInteresting. In Indonesian the same pattern exists too: memutuskan (to decide) and keputusan (decision) is based on putus (cut off).
- Mediterraneo10 5y agoThis is called a calque. After Latin became the prestige language if Western Europe, German coined new words on the basis of the Latin by matching the Latin prefix and root to German equivalents. There are many, many examples.
- janderson215 5y agoThank you for the word! I saw this pattern many times while learning German and it is difficult to articulate the the feeling of linguistic connectedness to somebody who doesn’t have an interest in other languages. This term helps :-)
- hannesm 5y agoHighly recommend the history of English podcast, which goes deep into the topics https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
- ArnoVW 5y agoInteresting. Explains why for example the French for "we have to decide" is translated as "il faut trancher" (trancher = to slice) I was wondering about Dutch, where the verb is "beslissen". But from what I gather from a (superficial) search, that comes from "beslitsen", which again comes from "splitsen" (breaking apart). Wondering now if the French expression for "making a difficult choice" has anything to do with it ("faire la part des choses" -> "breaking things up")
- herWifei97 5y agoActually I’m going to arrange to get new house. “(Please = to waiting)
- arp242 5y agoAccording to [1] the Dutch beslissen comes from the prefix "be" ("to") and "slissen" ("resolving a conflict or problem"). I like "to resolve a conflict" more than "to kill" :-) Fits well in the poldermodel too! Slissen is no longer used in modern Dutch for this, but used for "lisp" instead, but that didn't arrive until the early 20th century and seems to have an unrelated etymology which I can't seem to find right now; it could just be phonetic, or perhaps it's related in some strange way after all. [1]: http://www.etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/beslissen http://www.etymologiebank.nl/trefwoord/beslissen
- jerrre 5y agoTo clarify: lisp as in speech impediment, we don't have our own word for the programming language
- arp242 5y agoI wouldn't be surprised if it was translated as such somewhere though. I remember "root" (as in, root path, and root process) being translated to "wortel" in old versions of Gnome. You had stuff like "Wortelproces" and "wortelpad". This was over 15 years ago; I'm sure it's better now.
- jonplackett 5y agoI remember reading about this a while back that it’s cut as in ‘to cut off from all other possibility’ Not sure many people make decisions that definitively anymore! Priority is another one that used to be about only having on thing that is the priority, but later got diluted with words like prioritise where it’s just about having an order of importance, not one specific all encompassing purpose.
- josefx 5y agoGiven its origins can we add it to the naughty words lists? We ban master and slave, so it would make sense to also ban decision makers (murderers?).
- kappuchino 5y agoI can't tell if that is a serious or ironic comment. Others might also not be able to. So: Which one is it?
- truculent 5y agoIt is a joke and a rather childish one at that.
- kappuchino 5y agoThanks for the reply - as you can see, I ruled the joke out. Must be Monday.
- josefx 5y agoHalf joking. However I find the claim that the observation I made was "childish" sad. Seems like some people just live with the need to dismiss anything that doesn't align 100% with their worldview as infantile.
- enveu 5y agoIntresting
- kristiandupont 5y ago...so really, my indecision is a sign of empathy, for all the unchosen options? :-)
- layer8 5y agoIt’s cutting off branches from the decision tree.
- hnbad 5y agoA German song I'm fond of includes a line that roughly translates as "Every decision is a mass murder of possibilities". This seems a lot more apt given this etymology, even if it doesn't work for the German equivalent.
- lloeki 5y agoThere's a saying in French, attributed to André Gide: "Choisir, c'est renoncer" (to choose is to give up). That said, the title posted here is disingenuous: "decide" is not at all related to death, it's related to "cut" or "remove", it just so happens that that root is coincidentally used with prefixes leading to "remove life". So at best it has deadly siblings, not origins. In fact, I cannot see that title on the linked page, it seems to have been substituted from "Choices"?
- SiVal 5y agoin-cision: cut into de-cision: cut off (eliminate the alternatives) sui-cide, homi-cide, regi-cide, etc: cut/stab/slay self, a man, a king, etc.
- bbarnett 5y agoAnd herbicide too. My barber won't listen to me, but he foolishly keeps a bottle of barbicide around.
- agumonkey 5y agoSo when I cut my finger when fixing my laptop, did I commit suicide ? Homicide ? Digicide ?
- unbalancedevh 5y agoIncisicide.
- scotty79 5y ago> "Choisir, c'est renoncer" (to choose is to give up). This really resonates with me strongly. Choice is usually portrayed as empowerment or a something you can do from position of empowerment. But choosing is resigning to your fate and loosing everything you have not chosen. The truly empowered are the ones that don't need to choose much. And choice is not something you need to be empowered to do. There are really very few and very rare occasions where you truly have just one option. Usually when you think you have no choice, you really do, but you choose the current option that is not what you want because you still prefer it to all other you can imagine. Awareness of that fact helped me in toughest times.
- chronolitus 5y agoThis article reminded me of the word "decimate" Though it is now used to mean "to destroy a large number of", it used to have a very specific meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimation_(Roman_army)
- SigmundA 5y agoIt also has a specific meaning in signal processing [1] and always seems weird when I read or hear used in that way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downsampling_(signal_processing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downsampling_(signal_processin...
- dwighttk 5y agoSaved you a click: killing one out of ten captives.
- hprotagonist 5y agousually no; the classical case is “making a military unit punish itself by killing every 10th man at the hands of the other 9”.
- Grustaf 5y agoYeah, a specific and almost opposite meaning to how it's used now!
- swyx 5y agoalso memorably enacted in World War Z (the book) https://worldwarz.fandom.com/wiki/Holy_Russian_Empire https://worldwarz.fandom.com/wiki/Holy_Russian_Empire
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y agoI like the site! I am also enjoying some of the links, below.
- OisinMoran 5y agoFor a moment I thought this was going to go the route of Julian Jaynes' "On the Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and claim that it actually came from something closer to deicide—the killing of a god—in that making a decision was disobeying the orders of the gods (voices) in your head. A pretty interesting, if controversial, book.
- decuran 5y agoIf people are interested in diving deeper into etymologies, I made an app that allows you to visually explore all the roots, descendants, or relatives of a word: https://etymologyexplorer.com https://etymologyexplorer.com
- agumonkey 5y agoWhy do you think of etymonline.com ?
- decuran 5y agoYes, this is the site that inspired me! I was frustrated that it was so hard to navigate to cognates (word cousins) or from roots to descendants. So mine is focused on navigating between words like that
- agumonkey 5y agoI think he tried to add cognates on some words but I never really caught up with that.
- spodek 5y agoKnowing the origin of the word helps choosing and deciding. The hard part isn't figuring out which choice you like more, it's which you're more ready to kill, but most people focus on which they like more. I wrote a series of posts on using this awareness to make choosing and deciding easier, with graphs: https://joshuaspodek.com/choose-easier-visualizing-choices https://joshuaspodek.com/choose-easier-visualizing-choices and https://joshuaspodek.com/choose-easier-visualizing-choices-2 https://joshuaspodek.com/choose-easier-visualizing-choices-2.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoThis is really cool. I see a lot of people my age afraid of decisions. It is exactly because it cuts off what they think future possibilities are. The issue is that it is paralyzing for them, they can’t make any important decisions.
- agumonkey 5y agoIt's kinda the era of paradox of choice / abundance. We have access to everything all the time. Its probably linked to the addiction disorders online. It's not hard to guess how people knew how to decide better when things had more weight or were more critical. Cold, food, drought, disease, energy.. when everything is tight your brain is sharper too.
- toyg 5y agoThey didn't "know how to decide better", they just had fewer choices to make and much less information about results. Was it "better" to destroy this or that ecosystem, or consume resources to the point earth ran dry, or start random wars for "honor"? No, but they did it anyway - until they figured out it was a bad idea.
- agumonkey 5y agoI'm talking about personal choices not social level ones.
- toyg 5y agoSame: they couldn't decide what they'd become, they were largely expected to follow family tradition. Was it "better" to become a ironmonger because your dad was, even if you're completely hopeless at ironmongering, because the alternative is being disavowed or banished...?
- agumonkey 5y agoIMO (and I'd bet money that) 1000 years ago, if your village was good at <insert tradition> you knew clearly that it was the best choice at the time, and deviating from that was a life-or-death risk. Those who still felt like it left, they walked away, explored, died a lonely death or made it to a new place and came back, some became merchants.. or else. I still hold the contrast made the decision clearer, if you don't have the vision or grit to go against your local environment then it's simply better for you to follow it, at least it works.
- hprotagonist 5y agowith a similar base of “to cut or shear off”, the words “shit” and “science” are related. https://www.etymonline.com/word/shit https://www.etymonline.com/word/shit https://www.etymonline.com/word/science https://www.etymonline.com/word/science
- emodendroket 5y agoIn Latin decidere also meant to fall down, probably where we got the modern sense, and also the root of "deciduous."
- kgeist 5y agoOne more pair to the list ITT: in Russian, reshit means "to decide" but poreshit "to kill".
- Grustaf 5y agoWell, poreshit' is really just the perfectum form of reshit', so the real meaning is just "decide". The meaning "kill" is just slang, sort of like "do someone in".
- jasonhansel 5y agoInterestingly, Latin is known for having an immense number of words meaning "to kill": https://latin.stackexchange.com/a/768 https://latin.stackexchange.com/a/768
- inshadows 5y ago> I must say, as a spoken-Latin advocate, that, while Latin can be frustrating when you want to talk about things like a malfunctioning ATM or the difficulty one has signing up for a user account, when you're as angry a person as I am it's quite useful to have so many words with which to imagine people's violent ends. That made me smile. Thanks.
- motohagiography 5y agoThis is why it's important to think of decisions and choices differently. It's useful to think of a choice as something that submits you to the options presented, whereas a decision is necessarily made under uncertainty. It's worth thinking of them as the difference between perfect and imperfect information games, and the strategies for people who make decisions vs. those who make choices are using a different locus of control. A choice assumes an external locus, where a decision exercises an internal one. Some people are very good at selecting among options, others are good at acting under uncertainty. It's important to recognize what kind of information problem you are solving, and whether you need to employ a choice or a decision strategy. There are a bunch of these english synonyms that confuse and conflate some very important differences, and I think this is one of them.
- vitus 5y agoWhile it's possible that decide can be traced back to caedere (to cut, kill), it's also plausibly related to cadere (to fall, die; more relevantly, come to pass). The latter etymology also gives rise to words like "coincidence" (things happened together) and even "casual" (happened [by chance]). The Romans used a lot of euphemisms for death ("gave up his breath" is a common one, which gives rise to "expire").
- m1117 5y ago"Dead serious" also have a deadly origins lol
- wombatmobile 5y ago“Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.” ― Aristotle
- older 5y ago"Males have more teeth than females" ― Aristotle
- clarge1120 5y agoIncision - to cut into Decision - to cut away Making a decision is to cut away all other choices, leaving only one. It's why making a decision is so powerful: other choices are off the table and we're free to pursue a single option.
- slantaclaus 5y agoMeh so does “execute”, executive, etc