4 ms·
Made me dream up the (it turns out) false etymology of "ignite" deriving from ig-, lack of, and nite, nonstandard spelling variant of night, combining to mean "
by EForEndeavour 3y ago
Made me dream up the (it turns out) false etymology of "ignite" deriving from ig-, lack of, and nite, nonstandard spelling variant of night, combining to mean "remove darkness."
- mr_toad 3y agoWell the Romans loved their false etymologies, so it seems fitting.
- SamBam 3y agoCan you explain? I didn't even know Romans thought about etymologies.
- mr_toad 3y agoThey put quite a lot of though into it, and so did the Greeks. They thought that the origins of words could shed light (sometime divine light) on meaning, and they used etymology to tell stories and offer moral guidance. The problem is that many classical (and later) scholars, historians and poets were prone to uncritically repeating stories without doing any fact checking, or just making stuff up to fit the narrative. The same is true for their etymologies. Socrates and Plutarch in particular have reputations for their imaginative etymologies.
- yawboakye 3y ago(for readers wondering where then does ignite come from? it comes from ignire, latin which roughly translates to to set on fire, ignis being the latin for fire. the verb has a derivation similar to how we google, googled)