this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
-7 points (45.1% liked)
Asklemmy
43755 readers
1595 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a statement.
What's so confusing about the fact that word roots are pointless if they don't point to how a word is supposed to be used?
Suppose I was inventing a word, let's say "chronocide", and someone asked "if 'chrono' means 'time' and 'cide' means 'to kill', does 'chronocide' mean to kill some time" only for me to say "no, it's a name I gave a new state of matter", would that not be a waste of word construction?
The word wouldn't be applied to that for long though, as inevitably people going by the same train of thought as the other person might one day look for a fancy word that means "to kill some time", and the meaning of "chronocide" would slowly shift to its most fitting meaning.
Etymology has jurisdictional overwriting power over popularly-given word meanings for the very reason that it contains multiple words (in other languages no less) that already have an established meaning that would have to change first and simultaneously.
Language does not work that way. What you're saying is the linguistic equivalent of sovcit nonsense.
How so?