Interesting Etymologies

[Homer Potvin]

I have a 14 year old car with... wait for it... 68000 miles. My universe is an oblong septagon where aside from one outlier, no two points are more than 4 miles apart.

 

[Kerrin]

My universe is an oblong septagon where aside from one outlier, no two points are more than 4 miles apart.

This is the kind of sentence you only ever see on a writing forum.

 

[Homer Potvin]

This is the kind of sentence you only ever see on a writing forum.

Resaurant #7 will alter the geography to the more alliterative oblong octagon in the coming year.

 

[Louanne Learning]

I started reading philosopher Nelson Goodman's Ways of Worldmaking this morning.

Chapter One is entitled: Words, Works, Worlds

Got me thinking about the etymology of three such similar words. And no, they seem to have different roots, according to Etymology online

Word

Old English word "speech, talk, utterance, sentence, statement, news, report, word," from Proto-Germanic *wurda-

Work

Middle English werk, from Old English weorc, worc "a deed, something done, action (whether voluntary or required), proceeding, business;"

This is reconstructed to be from Proto-Germanic *werka- "work,"

World

Middle English, from Old English woruld, worold "human secular existence, pursuits, pleasures, and worries of this life," also "a long period of time," also "the human race, mankind, humanity" (but not "the earth"), a word peculiar to Germanic languages, with a literal sense of "age of man."

It is reconstructed to be from a Proto-Germanic compound of *wer "man" (Old English wer) and *ald "age" . Cognates include Old Saxon werold, Old Frisian warld, Dutch wereld, Old Norse verold, Old High German weralt, German Welt)

 

[JLT]

The word "travel" also gave us the words "travail" and "trouble." Anybody who's done a lot of traveling and hit unexpected snags can relate to that.

 

[Louanne Learning]

It's interesting to see old words get new meanings. These days, it seems a lot of that process comes out of the internet.

The Economist's Word of the Year for 2025 is "slop."

This word has been around since at least 1400, according to Etymology online:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/slop

c. 1400, "mudhole, puddle," probably from Old English -sloppe "dung" (in plant name cusloppe, literally "cow dung"), related to slyppe "slime" (from PIE root *sleubh- "to slide, slip").

The meaning "semi-liquid food" is by 1650s; that of "refuse liquid of any kind, household liquid waste" (usually slops) is from 1815. The meaning "affected or sentimental material" is by 1866.

The new meaning of "slop" - drivel and misinformation on the internet - has not yet made the entry . The Economist explains:

Its meaning has evolved from mud and slush, through a weak liquid used as a poorly nourishing food, to any kind of food scraps, to nonsense or rubbish.

Slop merchants clog up the internet with drivel. Enter a health question on Google and see how many of the top results are brand-new webpages with AI-written prose. Or scroll through Instagram and see how long it takes to come across a video that is made up of fake clips and an AI voiceover. Or head to X and see if you can distinguish the real MAGA accounts from those that were revealed (by a new “About this account” feature) to be slop-shops in Pakistan, Nigeria or Thailand.

 

[JLT]

It's interesting to see old words get new meanings. These days, it seems a lot of that process comes out of the internet.

The Economist's Word of the Year for 2025 is "slop."

There's another definition: imprecision, particularly when applied to things like statistics or tolerances in machinery. In both cases, there's a recognition that there is some "wiggle room" to be taken into account. Sometimes, it's a good thing, in that it demonstrates that the imprecision can lead to differences in interpretation of the data, or in that it allows for some imprecision beyond which tolerances are not permitted (as in the variation, usually measured in thousandths of an inch, permitted in a crankshaft's seating in a bearing, for instance).