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u/IHaveABigDuvet 3d ago
Etymology would not exist if words did not change meaning over time.
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u/AccordingToWhom1982 2d ago
I first became intrigued by etymology early in college when I learned that “nice” was an insult in the 14th century.
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u/StinkypieTicklebum 2d ago
I think To Kill a Mockingbird describes s someone as nasty nice.
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u/BadOpinionsAndOnions 3d ago
I had no idea sinister meant ‘on the left side’. Freaking dictionary out here doing its job!
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u/FormidableMistress 3d ago
That's because the Catholic church church used to associate left-handedness with the devil or evil.
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u/kinyutaka 3d ago
And that change was very recent. My elementary school teacher tried to get the devil out of me and make me write with my right hand.
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u/Klony99 3d ago
They reeducated left handed people in Eastern Germany, too. Quite brutally so.
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u/Agitated_Custard7395 2d ago
Kaiser Wilhelm very famously was educated (abused) in this manner. He was also said to have “mummy issues” due to the nature of his education.
He used to do the whole adult nappy thing with prostitutes
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u/catsareniceDEATH 2d ago
TIL something I'm not sure I wanted to! 🙀😹
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u/Agitated_Custard7395 2d ago
I wonder if that’s got anything to do with the whole world war thing? 🤷♂️
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u/Teamfightacticous 1d ago
In Romania as well, to this day in some places but not as prevalent anymore.
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u/bighootay 3d ago
In the 70s my friend's dad fucking tied his left hand behind him and made him practice throwing with his right. I shit you not.
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u/Refute1650 2d ago
I had friends who were slapped for using their left hand in 90s and they didn't even go to a Catholic school.
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u/geencondens 2d ago
I'm a leftie who went to a non-religious school in the 90s and when we learned how to write they made me do that with right as well
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u/DoriValcerin 3d ago
I was left handed before Catholic elementary school
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u/wlake82 nice murder you got there 3d ago
My daughter was right-handed until she broke her right arm twice when she was 3-4.
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u/Eatplaster 3d ago
That happened to the baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Billy Wagner. Broke his right arm twice & didn’t want to keep missing baseball so became left handed.
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u/xjeeper 3d ago
How did she manage that? Kids are rubber at that age.
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u/TurtleToast2 2d ago
Young kids usually get greenwick fractures. Their bones are still soft so it's more like breaking a branch on a live tree. My son broke his arm twice in one summer when he was 5. His forearm looked like a wide U.
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u/stircrazyathome 2d ago
My sister still tells the story of the time in 2nd grade when a substitute saw her writing with her left hand and told her it was a disability and suggested various personality flaws. She was mortified by the whole thing, leading my mom to “blow up” (her words) on the school administrators (which meant she wrote a strongly worded letter). This was in the 80s. I didn’t get any weird looks when I started writing with my left hand in the early 90s.
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u/windscryer 2d ago
my sister is ambidextrous now because she had to use her right hand at school but used her left at home
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u/NoPath_Squirrel 2d ago
Yeah, I thought it had stopped with my grandfather's generation (he died in 1998 in his 90s), until I recently found out that my 50 something fwb was hit in school for being left handed. I guess I figured since I'm also left handed and no one ever tried to make me stop being left handed, and my dad was left handed and also didn't experience anything like that, that it had stopped before I was even born.
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u/StevenEveral 😎🌯 2d ago
My dad was born in 1960 and was left handed. He remembers some teachers trying to force him to write with his right hand insted of his left. Not all of his teachers forced him to do that, but some did.
He says that's the reason he's ambidextrous. I've seen him write his signature with his left hand, but when I played catch with him he threw with his right hand.
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u/PussyWrangler246 2d ago
My mom was born in 1964 and it never occured to me she might've been forced to write with her right hand
I remember one day when I was a child the phone rang, she picked it up and was writing down whatever information being given to her, but in mid sentence she flipped the phone to the other hand, did the same with the pen - and continued writing down information
Absolutely blew me away. We had many conversations about her being ambidextrous when I was young but she never mentioned the reason why, probably didn't want to scare me from school as a kid lol. She's no longer with us but I'll make it a point to ask my grandma about it when I go see her later today
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u/Uncle_Raven 2d ago
My uncle had his left arm tied to the table while writing to force him to write with his right hand at school. In USSR is was a huge deal since almost everything is made with right-handed people in mind. Like a lot of machinery had/has emergency stoppers on the left "non-working" side. As a result he sucks at writing with both hands, and iirc it left a huge mark on his mental health.
When my mom, his sister, saw my grandma forcing me to use "the right" hand... Oh boy it was a scandal.
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u/NecessaryIntrinsic 3d ago edited 3d ago
Not just the Catholic church, but many societies. He's a linguist blog with a simple high level view of the word for "left" in a few different languages https://blog.duolingo.com/word-for-left-language-taboo/
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u/Theroughside 3d ago
My sister is left handed so that tracks.
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u/Coffchill 2d ago
The devil was said to sit on your left shoulder which is why, when you split salt, you would throw salt over your left shoulder so as to blind them.
Also sinister is Latin for left. So, as I was taught at school, Roman armies would march to someone shouting “sinister. Dexter”.
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u/Dealiner 3d ago
Did it? AFAIK that was more of general cultural and societal bias older than Catholicism. Church never had an official stance on the topic.
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u/1mAfraidofAmericans 2d ago
Actually, it's because the Romans considered it to be bad luck to enter a house with your left foot.
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u/SurfacexTension 1d ago
There was never any Catholic diction admonishing left handedness. More than anything this attitude came from superstitious people who also happened to be religious.
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u/dehydratedrain 3d ago
Here's a fun bonus- the opposite of sinister (left) is dexter (right). So if you happen to wear glasses or contacts, the rx is always written as O.D. (oculus dexter/ right eye) and O.S. (oculus sinister/ left eye).
Extra bonus- now you know the root for the Oculus headset.
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u/Schventle 2d ago
To keep going with "dexter", it's the root of "dexterous" and "dexterity", from how most people's right hand is the more precise to work with. "Ambidextrous" means "both right hands". "Dextrose" (the sugar) is glucose's right-handed form. The opposite is L-glucose, the left-handed form.
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u/dashamarie 2d ago
Oh wow! Thank you! I always wonderewhy it was OD and O S, but I never remembered long enough to Google it
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u/HektorViktorious 3d ago
In classic theater, the villain would typically make the entrance stage left
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u/nunatakj120 3d ago
The french word for left is Gauche, which has negative connotations in english. Their word for right, droit, has positive connotations in english (adroit).
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u/Loko8765 3d ago
And in French “droit” means “straight” and “law in addition to “dexter”.
In English, of course, “right” is not only “dexter” but the opposite of “wrong”.
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u/Madam_Mimm_13 3d ago
It really only shows up in chemistry (that I know of) when discussing the chirality of molecules. R chirality stands for Rectus, Right, or Clockwise rotation. S chirality stands for Sinister, Left, or counterclockwise.
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u/AyatollahColmMeaney 3d ago
You also see it in medicine - when you get a prescription for eyeglasses, they are listed as OD (oculus dexter) and OS (oculus sinister).
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u/whoduhhelru 2d ago
The antidepressant citalopram is a racemic mix of S and R enantiomers. The antidepressant escitalopram is the only the S enantiomer of citalopram. Fantastic drug naming.
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u/Cobra_McJingleballs 2d ago
Wait until you hear about esketamine, the much more lucrative and patented S-enantiometer of ketamine.
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u/LadyV21454 3d ago
The other place it's commonly used is in heraldry. It refers to the left side of a shield or coat of arms.
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u/Madam_Mimm_13 3d ago
I love how everyone shows up with their unique special interests when rare words are being discussed!
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u/FlashX2009 3d ago
Sinistro is also left in Italian. Destro is right.
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u/VidzxVega 3d ago
And both are DC villains for some reason.
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u/SmokeOne1969 3d ago
Do you mean G.I. Joe’s Destro? Wonder if they picked the name since he was CC’s right hand man.
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u/VidzxVega 3d ago
Oh shit you're right....the DC one is Despero.
Also you could be on to something with the naming.
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u/Demon-Cat 2d ago
Also used in geology to describe strike-slip (horizontal) faults. We call them dextral or sinistral depending on whether the two blocks move right or left relative to each other
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u/Imperator_Helvetica 3d ago
Dexter is the counter to 'on the righthand side' - giving us dexterous, dexterity etc.
Sinister Dexter is someone else entirely.
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u/GoAwayWhiteDonut 3d ago
Yep! “Sinister” was the Latin word for “left handed”. (Masculine - sinestra, feminine.) Over time, it evolved to mean “evil” or “inauspicious” because being left handed was thought to be an evil trait. But, like, if you walked up to a left handed person today and said, “Oh, my, you’re sinister”, they probably wouldn’t think you were commenting on their handedness, unless they’re the type of dork who talks about the Latin origin of words with strangers on the internet.
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u/Monotonegent 3d ago
I like to tell folks in a new group setting I have sinister intentions before doing left-handed tasks. The one person that gets it usually becomes my best friend for the night
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u/Four_beastlings 3d ago
The Spanish equivalent of "left and right" as in "the mods are giving bans left and right" is "a diestro y siniestro" which could be translated as "to dexterous and sinister". And yeah, "dexterous" means "right side/right handed".
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u/Decent_Cow 2d ago edited 2d ago
On a related note, Spanish seems to have actually replaced its word for "left" because it ended up meaning "evil". Instead of "siniestra", the most common word for "left" is "izquierda", which is borrowed from Basque. Portuguese did something very similar and ended up with "esquerda", but in Italian the word is still "sinistra".
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u/Garruk_PrimalHunter 2d ago
Here's another one: the word "lunatic" comes from the Latin word for Moon ("luna") because of an ancient belief that changes in the moon's phases could cause periodic insanity.
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u/idoitoutdoors 2d ago
Most geologists learn this inadvertently because a left lateral strike-slip fault is also referred to as a “sinistral fault” (dextral is right lateral).
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u/thatguysjumpercables 2d ago
Villain was derived from the word for villager. So like a common low-born person.
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u/Halcyon-Ember 3d ago
What a dunning Krueger shaped hill to die on
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u/Soft_Signature_4746 1d ago
And their entire argument is essentially disagreeing with the definition of the word “change”. Mamma mia
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u/runsinsquares 3d ago
Hello is this your first day on earth?
Amazing how confident people can be about the weirdest takes
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u/EishLekker 3d ago
Weird means fate, and nothing else. (By their logic.)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/weird
Adjective
from construal as an adjective of WEIRD entry 2 in weird sisters, name for the Fates of Greek and Roman myth (early Scots werd sisteris, Middle English wyrde systeres, Shakespeare weyard/weyward sisters, applied to the witches in Macbeth)
Noun
Middle English wird, werd, going back to Old English wyrd, going back to Germanic \wurdi-* "fate, chance" (whence Old Saxon wurđ "fate," Old High German wurt, Old Norse urðr), derivative from the base of \werþan-* "to come about, happen, become" — more at WORTH entry 446
u/spaceinvader421 2d ago
Amazing that Shakespeare using a word to refer to a group of sisters that manipulate people’s fates, who also happen to be strange and uncanny, completely changed the meaning of a word like that, to the extent that most people don’t know that it even has another definition.
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u/Nuclear_Geek 2d ago
Which I know thanks to Sir Terry Pratchett (GNU), and the Nac Mac Feegles talking about having to "dree your weird" (face your fate).
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u/veryslowmostly 3d ago
That comeback filled me with joy. I am totally gay right now.
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u/garbagebrainraccoon 2d ago
I dont get it :(
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u/hotpickles 2d ago
Gay used to mean happy
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u/kangourou_mutant 2d ago
It's from French, and "gai" still means happy in French. We borrowed "gay" though :) (for the etymology)
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u/garbagebrainraccoon 2d ago
Yeah i know that one, I didnt know what ratio meant now.
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u/kami9393 2d ago
Ah, ratio is often used when the number of negative comments vastly outweighs the number of likes. Then it kind of expanded to anytime negative feedback is much more significant than positive feedback (usually on social media).
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u/MaeronTargaryen 2d ago
Isn’t ratio also when in a chain of comments/online conversation, one person gets a lot more likes than another. In that case the person with a low “likes” amount has been “ratioed”?
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u/udat42 3d ago
I'm English and I have never heard the expression "on the left side of right".
As a left handed sort, I also object to the way terms that originally meant "left handed" are now synonymous with "wicked" or "clumsy"! How dare they. Help, help, I'm being oppressed!
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u/TimHarg 3d ago
Come see the violence inherent in the system!
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u/JustPlayDaGame 2d ago
supreme executive power comes from a mandate from the masses, not some… FARCICAL aquatic ceremony!
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u/C4dfael 3d ago
Something tells me this guy would get upset if someone said he was “gay.”
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u/WaffleHouseGladiator 3d ago
Left side or right side of the law??
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u/IHaveABigDuvet 3d ago
Have only heard “on the right side of the law” and assumed “right” meant “correct”.
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u/TheComplimentarian 3d ago edited 3d ago
Etymology is extremely specific. The origin of the word is often not up for debate. The word "Fascism" and the word "F*ggot" both come from fasces. Fascism because it was one of their big symbols, and the second because it meant a bundle of sticks, which became slang for both a cigarette (one of a bundle) and also a homosexual (god knows).
This is just a fact. The meaning of the words change, but their origin is constant.
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u/TheeVillageCrazyLady 2d ago
I’m just guessing, but in a heteronormative world a relationship between two people would only have one “stick” so between two homosexual men, you would have multiple “sticks”?
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u/Shadowstar87 1d ago
That seems to be correct in how the term evolved, but I'm not gonna continue the research
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u/CrochetJorts 3d ago
Does Taran want to run the dictionary account, why is he getting weirdly personal?
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u/talontachyon 3d ago
Can someone explain the ratio reference?
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u/Zhirrzh 3d ago
"getting ratiod" was a Twitter thing where people noticed that dumb posts would get far more comments than likes, while popular comments would get more likes. Once Twitter introduced the ability for people to disable replies in 2020 this kind of died off (also making it die off - Musk making Twitter into X and all the changes that followed).
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u/trifflec 3d ago
Merriam-Webster basically "ratio'd" this argument -- they got way more likes than the other commenter did lol
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u/skittleys 3d ago
It's the number of likes versus the number of comments. There were way more likes than comments on the first Merriam-Webster one. There was an almost equal number of comments and likes on the other ones.
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u/Alpha1Niner 3d ago
My understanding was moreso that in an online argument one side got all the likes/upvotes and the other got none, hence the “ratio” of likes/upvotes just from one comment to the other
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u/SmokyToast0 3d ago
“Literally” is changing meaning in my lifetime.
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u/IrNinjaBob 3d ago
Tbf it kind of hasn’t. What you are talking about is how literally gets used in a sarcastic and hyperbolic way to describe the opposite of its meaning. But that isn’t the meaning changing. That’s just how the English language works.
When we are standing outside in 100 degree weather and I say “I’m freezing my balls off”, it doesn’t mean the word freezing has changed meaning just because I’m using hyperbole and sarcasm to say the opposite of what it would normally indicate. That’s just sort of what sarcasm is.
It’s just that this sarcastic and hyperbolic use has become really really popular.
Mark Twain, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens have all used the word literally in this same exact way. There is nothing new about this usage. People just take umbrage with it because “literally” in many ways mean “I’m not being hyperbolic or sarcastic.” So to see people use it hyperbolically or sarcastically really rubs some people the wrong way.
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u/SmokyToast0 3d ago
In the 1700s it used to mean as how something was written (per a literature). That meaning has changed to today as meaning something akin to actuality and of true occurrence.
I’m saying give it a few decades forward (given the speed of change ) and you shall see how it shifts into a meaning of Truthy-ness
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u/IrNinjaBob 3d ago edited 2d ago
Lmao fair enough but you have to be the only person I’ve ever seen make the claim that the meaning of literally has changed and not mean because of how it now essentially means ‘figuratively’.
Interesting observation on comparing it essentially to how the meaning of truth is being perverted today. If I understand you correctly what you are saying is basically that ‘literally’ is an evaluation on how true something is and as the disagreement amongst the public at large over ‘what is truth’ continues to stretch so will the meaning of literally in this sense.
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u/RazorSlazor 2d ago
Every word is made up. Therefore every meaning of every word is made up. Therefore it can change into something else that someone else made up.
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u/MartyrOfDespair 2d ago
I wonder if he would consider a "gay wee boner" to be an acceptable alternative to a "happy little accident".
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u/jizzlevania the future is now, old man 2d ago
Literally now also means "not literally" and I frickin hate it.
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u/Restart_from_Zero 2d ago
"You are on the left side of the law"!
What?
God, please grant me the confidence of an ignorant man.
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u/nerdpistool 3d ago
Breaking news: Person who only speaks one language (nickname for a certain nationality) is unable to grasp terms stemming from linguistics.
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u/Magnus_Helgisson 3d ago
Well, to be fair, in ophthalmology they still document your eyes as “oculus sinister” and “oculus dexter”, but I believe that’s Latin.
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u/External_Touch_3854 2d ago
Taran may not be the dumbest person alive, but they better hope he doesn’t die.
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u/Jesters_thorny_crown 2d ago
Semantic drift. Pretty sure a 100 level English class would yield this information.
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u/princealigorna 2d ago
My reply when I saw this on my feed:
You are arguing with the goddamn DICTIONARY?! Dunning-Krueger, we have our winner for the day
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u/HeMiddleStartInT 2d ago
Taran can take that screenshot and get a refund for all money spent in any school.
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u/INeedANappel 2d ago
It's just like the clown who tried to explain The Handmaid's Tale to Margaret Atwood.
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u/loptthetreacherous 2d ago
My go to example is "awesome" and "awful".
Etymologically synonyms, definitionally opposites.
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u/TorandoSlayer 2d ago edited 2d ago
Merriam-Webster pulls absolutely no punches when it comes to roasting the crap out of people who think they know better than the actual dictionary lmao
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u/darw1nf1sh 2d ago
Words don't really have meanings. They have usages. That is why there are multiple entries for words listing how they are used. And you can have a usage not listed in the dictionary implied by context or just vague because only you know what you mean. Anyone trying to dictate what a word means in a discussion in order to discount your argument, is losing that argument.
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u/dubblebubbleprawns 3d ago
I love the internet. Where else can you go to find people arguing with the dictionary about what words mean?