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The Origin of the Word Daemon (2002)
- hislaziness 4y agoFascinating story. Daemon domes from Maxwell's thought experiment.
- jhbadger 4y agoWell, Maxwell himself used "demon" but it is inferred that he meant to write "daemon" as there is nothing malevolent about his imaginary creature.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> Maxwell himself used "demon" but it is inferred that he meant to write "daemon" as there is nothing malevolent about his imaginary creature. It's the same word. There's no distinction between them. Writing "daemon" instead of "demon" is the same thing as writing "paedagogy" instead of "pedagogy". There is no inference available to be drawn.
- jhbadger 4y agoThere is from connotation though. It's not like the example you mention which is just a case of UK vs US spellings. In both the US and UK, "demon" means an evil spirit and daemon has other meanings, either technical or relating to Greek mythology.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoNo, there isn't. As etymonline will tell you: > The usual ancient Greek sense [of demon], "supernatural agent or intelligence lower than a god, ministering spirit" is attested in English from 1560s Or as Merriam-Webster will tell you: > demon (noun) > variants or daemon > (usually daemon) an attendant power or spirit: GENIUS Maxwell used the ordinary spelling of a common word. Why would anyone assume he meant to write something strange instead of something normal?
- jhbadger 4y agoBecause the non-strange meaning was "demon" in the Judeo-Christian sense. Before UNIX, people who weren't experts in Greek mythology had never heard of any other meaning, even if it existed among scholars.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoThere's no question of what Maxwell meant. He is using the word in a relatively rare sense, yes. And he's spelling it exactly the way you'd expect. There is nothing out of the ordinary and therefore nothing to explain. > people who weren't experts in Greek mythology The word isn't really relevant to Greek mythology. It's relevant to Greek philosophy.
- sn41 4y agoSocrates did not originate the word, his usage is the most famous we have historically available. The Greeks believed in good spirits helping people ("Eudaemon") and evil spirits for darker purposes ("cacodaemon")[1]. It was believed that people had these spirits helping or harming them as the case may be. The same goes for "genius", a spirit from whom we get the words genie as well as "Djinn". The common usage was that (quoted by Elizabeth Gilbert) a great person "had a genius", as in, a spirit helping them, as opposed to "is a genius", which is a later usage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cacodemon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cacodemon this is also the origin of the "Cacodemon" in Doom.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> The same goes for "genius", a spirit from whom we get the words genie as well as "Djinn". Genie does come from genius, but djinn is an unrelated Arabic word.
- NoZebra120vClip 4y ago> djinn is an unrelated Arabic word. [citation needed] Various dictionaries disagree vehemently with you. (Also, djinn is not even an Arabic word. It's a romanized word.) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/genie https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/genie
- basilgohar 4y agoLinked from that same page is a citation [0] that djinn is, in fact, or Arabic origin. Where do you get that it's a romanized word? Unless you mean romanized in the sense that it's spelled using the latin alphabet, but that's overly pedantic even by HN standards. [0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jinni https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jinni
- NoZebra120vClip 4y ago> but that's overly pedantic even by HN standards. Thank you! I'm overly flattered. (Also, that is always what linguists mean when we write "romanized", or as the Japanese say, rōmaji.)
- mwcampbell 4y agoThe acronym etymology is presented as fact at the start of Daniel Suarez's novel Daemon, which claims the expansion is "disk and execution monitor". I always found that etymology suspect.
- Aperocky 4y agoThe etymology is always suspect, but at least in this case the outcome does justice. This compares sharply to the bills where similar word play happen...
- rgrieselhuber 4y agoI think of it as roughly equivalent to the subconscious mind.
- pyuser583 4y agoAccording to Augustine, translator of pagan ideas for early Christians, daemons those beings greater than man but less than the gods.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago>> The former came to English from medieval Latin, while the latter was from classical Latin. And it probably came to Latin from Greek: "δαίμων" is a deity, or spirit, not necessarily associated with something evil. As a sibling comment hints at, Socrates used to say that he had a "δαίμων" inside him, that advised him. This was used against him in his trial where one of the accusations was that he "introduced new daemons" ("εισάγει καινά δαιμόνια"), meaning new gods, new religions, he was essentially accused of prosyletising. And of corrupting youth, of course (well, one of his students was Alcibiades, a young man so debauched that it was easy to believe he had been corrupted by someone, probably many people at once, and many more times than one; probably being corrupted right now, as we speak). Source: I grew up Greek and was corrupted as a youth by reading Socrates' words, as transcribed by Plato. Plato did not have enough deamonic powers in him to corrupt a wet noodle.