Essay:Surprising Dates of Origin for Terms

(Difference between revisions)

One can learn history simply by skimming a dictionary that has the date of origin for terms. There are many surprises. Add to our growing list:

Before being picked up by science fiction writers, the word was simply an adjective meaning "humanlike". It's hard to imagine such a late date of origin. Perhaps the word became necessary as an increasing number of people turned away from the authority of the Bible? This problem predates Facebook by nearly 500 years! a surprisingly late date of origin for such a widely used adjective that's surprisingly recent for such a simple concept; wonder what held it up? Wow: that's many years after it was added to the Constitution! Perhaps you thought a car company in Detroit invented this name for a sports car? Not by a long shot: it was a type of warship ranked just below a frigate an oppressive, unjustified influence of the past; this problem is not new, and led to the Rule Against Perpetuities in property law surprisingly late date of origin, the term means "terrifying lizard," which raises the question of why its real name of lizard is not used today The term "diploma" seems to be an invention of atheistic sentiments in the Enlightenment, and unrelated to scholarly achievement or even the development of the universities hundreds of years earlier to gather together in honor of Christ, often in a new church ... yet it predates Protestantism by two centuries?! Looks like nuclear fission is not a new idea after all! What did flags hang on for centuries before that? Flagstaffs. Predates baseball by 400 years; Merriam-Webster defines it to mean violence and especially murder. That's surprisingly early for this terrific insight. It's surprising that this descriptive term predates modern media by several centuries! What was the prior greeting? Is this surprisingly late date of origin due to the invention of the telephone? This term means incapable or unwilling to be corrected. Liberals have been around since the 1300s?! Why did it take more than a century for the famous signatory's name to become a colloquialism for "signature"? Land was much more important in culture and the economy before the Information Age. Think landlord problems are new? This is one of the very oldest words in the English language. That revelation then opens one's eyes to what the word really is: Lord of the land, in the feudal system. Apparently this was not a recognized athletic field event much before the revival of the Olympics in 1896. separation of church and state More than ten years after the adoption of the First Amendment, the least Christian of the early presidents (Thomas Jefferson) used the phrase for the first time in an appeasing letter to Baptists. (It's also important to note that he used the term to assure them that their religious rights took precedence over the government--not the other way around.) The Supreme Court did not endorse this phrase until the liberal Justice Hugo Black used the term in 1947 (Everson v. Board of Education). (The Court also quoted from the Jefferson without endorsing the phrase in the 1879 polygamy case of Reynolds v. United States). Nearly a hundred years after "atheism" (1587). Perhaps such an obvious position that no word was required until atheism became more widespread? Did people really think in terms of the entire world nearly 400 years ago? Apparently so.

View the original article here