Recorder doesn't just confuse him, it confused me as well the first time I heard the word. I'd always called the musical instrument a flute, which was apparently wrong, although I don't know why since tons of other instruments that look just like a recorder are called flutes.
A recorder is a flute, more specifically, a fipple flute. But there are other fipple flutes, such as tin whistles. (One distinguishing feature of a recorder is the use of the thumb hole to control octaves.) So calling a recorder a "flute" isn't exactly wrong, but is under-specific. Also, nowadays transverse flutes are often called just "flutes", inviting confusion if you call a recorder a flute.
The etymology you reference seems speculative, not really contradicting the article's claim that the etymology isn't clear.
What's called a flute that looks like a recorder? (Don't say 'flutes'..) I can think of oboes and clarinets, which are called that not flute. I'm no musician but to me a flute goes to the side; I assume per sibling comment that's what a 'transverse flute' is.
Flutes that have fipples, like penny whistles (or recorders), vessel flutes (some of which have fipples, like an ocarina), end-blown flutes without a fipple like the xiao (which also happens to have a side-blown varient).
There are many, but the word is somewhat amorphous. Personally, I would call almost anything that uses a Helmholtz resonator instigated with the mouth as the initial oscillator a "flute," but will also take it to mean "orchestral flute" based on guessed context in conversation.
The thing that makes clarinets and oboes not flutes is that they have one or more reeds rather than producing a direct Helmholtz resonator.
Although "Helmholtz resonator" is often used to describe a broader range of resonators than Helmholtz's original design, I think it's dubious to call fipple flutes "Helmholtz resonators". The fipple mechanism sets up an oscillating sheet of air going into and out of the pipe, which isn't present in traditional Helmholtz resonators. See:
These are uncontroversially flutes, so the definition would have to be "mouth-blown wind instruments that generate a tone without using vibrating parts".
>I've always thought that 'boy' sounded suspiciously close to the Swiss German translation "bueb" (or sometimes "buebe"), almost pronounced "b-way-b"
According to Etymology Online[0]:
`boy (n.)
mid-13c., boie "servant, commoner, knave" (generally young and male); c. 1300, "rascal, ruffian, knave; urchin," mid-14c. as "male child before puberty" (possibly extended from the "urchin" sense). A word of unknown origin.
Possibly from Old French embuie "one fettered," from Vulgar Latin imboiare, from Latin boia "leg iron, yoke, leather collar," from Greek boeiai dorai "ox hides." (Words for "boy" double as "servant, attendant" across the Indo-European map — compare Italian ragazzo, French garçon, Greek pais, Middle English knave, Old Church Slavonic otroku — and often it is difficult to say which meaning came first.)
But it also appears to be identical with East Frisian boi "young gentleman," and perhaps with Dutch boef "knave," from Middle Dutch boeve, perhaps from Middle Low German buobe. This suggests a gradational relationship to babe. Another conjecture:
In Old English, only the proper name Boia has been recorded. ME boi meant 'churl, servant' and (rarely) 'devil.' In texts, the meaning 'male child' does not antedate 1400. ModE boy looks like a semantic blend of an onomatopoeic word for an evil spirit ( *boi) and a baby word for 'brother' ( *bo). [Liberman]
Used slightingly of young men in Middle English, also in familiar or contemptuous use of criminal toughs or men in the armed services. In some local uses "a man," without reference to age (OED lists "in Cornwall, in Ireland, in the far West of the U.S."). The meaning "male negro slave or Asian personal servant of any age" attested from c. 1600.
Extended form boyo is attested from 1870. Emphatic exclamation oh, boy is attested by 1917. Boy-meets-girl "typical of a conventional romance" is from 1945; the phrase itself is from 1934 as a dramatic formula. Boy-crazy "eager to associate with males" is from 1923.
A noticable number of the modern words for 'boy', 'girl', and 'child' were originally colloquial nicknames, derogatory or whimsical, in part endearing, and finally commonplace. These, as is natural, are of the most diverse, and in part obscure, origin. [Buck]"
Similarly, it bears striking resemblance to the Swedish 'pojke', which can be colloquially shortened to 'pojk' and also means boy. It's apparently been derived from Finnish within the last millenium, though, so could be a false cognate.
New words are invented all the time, but girl, boy, dog you'd expect to be ancient concepts with ancient etymologies. 'noob' has an obvious etymology in new-neue-niwe. The idea that 'dog' doesn't blows my mind - especially since the guttural, monosyllabic utterances are often the oldest.
While not as recent, the Germanic "ship" / "Schiff" / etc. has no cognate in any other Indo-European language and no obvious origin in PIE, so it is conjectured it might be derived from a pre-IE indigenous European language.
Sounds plausiblel. Don't know why you're downvoted, frequently used ones are more prone to it I'd say, just because the possibility that someone thinks of or stumbles upon a new name for it is higher. Maybe Dog was the name of someones Hound and his/her family started naming so, and then a village, county , dutchy , country because it was short and convenient
I think they have been downvoted because they’ve suggested a solution which is, while plausible, not very interesting, and done so in a tone that could be read as somewhat aggressive. Also, which we could not hope to have evidence for (except in an absence of evidence for any other theory).
It is much rarer for a word to be created out of whole cloth. Most words come from modifying or combining existing words. Even when people try to create new words, they often use an existing word as the basis to give it some additional meaning.
They don't _have_ to, but it's an observed fact that they mostly _did_. There are vanishingly few examples of purely new coinages outside of scientific terms before the modern era.
The reason why is mostly a bootstrapping problem. The purpose of words is communication, and it's a lot easier to adapt an existing word to a new purpose that it is to just invent some new pattern of sounds and convince people to start using it. It's easier now with mass media, but prior to that, nearly impossible.
Another area where words are created is in product names. They can be created purely synthetically but even those often still use existing words as the basis for the creation.
For every "Zyrtec" (which still plays on "tech") you have "Claritin" ("clear/clarity") and others.
Even new words tend to have clear etymologies. Laser was LASER, for example - an acronym became a word in itself. Many scientific terms are just from Latin or Greek, which makes sense in the context of European science - languages that all scientists, regardless of where they were in Europe, would have at least some familiarity with, making it easier to translate and recognize across vernacular languages. I understand very little French, but “50 millimetre” doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out.
Only tangentially related, but I've been auditing "The History of English Podcast"[0] and if this sort of thing interests you, you'll probably like that too.
Fabulous podcast. Fascinating how we can use pronunciation shifts to
date the arrival of a word into English, and how some words have entered
the language multiple times by different routes. Also, I learned that
there really was a castle in a swamp, in Wessex, to which King Alfred
retreated during a particularly heavy Viking invasion.
This is going to sound like damning with faint praise, but it's not meant that way -- this is absolutely my favorite thing to listen to while trying to fall asleep.
His voice is quite soothing, and it's interesting enough to constantly hold your attention, while not being _so_ interesting that it keeps you awake, and while it's loosely organized chronologically on an episode-by-episode basis, within each episode it's sort of arranged thematically, so you can dip in and out of consciousness and not be confused as to what he's talking about, and you can pick it up the next night at some random spot and not really feel like you missed much. It also has long stretches where he's just sort of listing off words and etymologies, which are the kinds of trivial facts I love, but I think my brain also takes as a signal to turn off.
I used to listen to the podcast when it was still young. His original goal was to do it in maybe 100 episodes or so. After he started making money from Patreon, it slowed to a crawl in terms of progressing through the history of the language.
Eventually, I gave up. I’m not one of his backers, so he doesn’t owe me anything, but I would have preferred it if he did something more like Dan Carlin (there are plenty of quibbles about his historiography, but you have to admit he’s very good at storytelling), doing deep dives on various subjects instead of beating Middle and early Modern English to death. Yes, they were very important times in the language, where the mostly-comprehensible Middle English turned into the entirely-comprehensible (if you have footnotes for words whose meaning has changed and cultural references that no longer apply) early Modern English, but the language hasn’t been static since 1500.
To audit a course, say at university, means to attend and perhaps do assignments but not pay fees nor receive credit for a course. It is often observed as someone "sitting in" on lectures without writing the final exam.
Another usage is for supervising professors who attend a lecture to "audit" it in the sense that an IRS auditor would audit a tax return. They are examining the junior professor's performance or adherence to guidelines.
But it remains an open question under either definition, since this podcast series isn’t a college course. And, for all we know, the original poster is not a professor…
However, to OP: a facetious response quoting literature is quite unkind. While you may feel that 'audit' means something particular, the fact is that it has a couple of definitions and none of them are immediately apparent (to me, a native speaker).
It's also quite prone to being used as a 'false friend' for something who speaks romance languages in which the normal verb for 'listen' is close to the Latin.
Bear in mind that this is the internet, and no-one can be sure whether English is anyone's first language. As an external observer, I can't tell if you are a native English speaker, and I cannot tell whether the person asking the question is a native English speaker.
A better way to approach the question would have been just to give the benefit of the doubt and answer simply and clearly.
Source is The Conversation that seems to have a strangely-open republication approach licensing stuff via Creative Commons BY-ND. https://theconversation.com/five-common-english-words-we-don... includes a button that just gives you the HTML and some tracking code/image.
Purely linguistic question here. What is the word for having a sexual fantasy about someone? Since this must happen a lot, I'm wondering if all languages have a single (transitive?) verb for it. If not, then why not?
Thanks, but it doesn't come really close to the meaning I was looking for.
I find it difficult to believe that we don't have a good word for what 99+% of people are doing since puberty and allows also to express the object of the fantasy using a simple subject+verb+object type of sentence.
Since sexual themes are heavily regulated or prohibited in most cultures, such a word may fail to exist, or to survive intact through the millennia. I suppose that local metaphoric and slang words, and contextually-altered expressions (like the generic "daydream" narrowed to that sense) replace it in many / most cases.
Same with words for copulation (highly restricted) and even for wooing / courting, which are also pretty universal activities since times immemorial.
Yes, it doesn't, but that's your answer because there is no single, exclusive English word for sexually desiring someone. So there can't really be one that exclusively refers to sexually fantasizing about them, at least, not until the age of extensive psychological and sociological taxonomies.
My response to your finding it difficult to believe is: you're asking for a word for an intensely private act! Think about how rarely people overtly and bluntly say they are sexually fantasizing about someone. When it's actually admitted to, it's done using a variety of metaphors, slang and indirect hints.
And in general, we don't have a commonly used prefix or second compounded word to turn a physical act into a fantasy. Even though "fuck" predates Early Modern there was nothing commonly attached to it to make it mental.
In my experience, modern English adopts idioms more often than new words. "Sexual fantasy" is a common term for what you're asking about. It may sound too dry and basic to be an idiom, but remember that English is packed, filled, stuffed, and choked with synonyms. That most people say "sexual fantasy" points to it being an idiom. "Dirty thoughts" would be a close contender.
If you really want a single verb, "lust."
For sexual fantasies about somebody one's looking at, "undressing with one's eyes."
Do you mean "have" as in to possess a thing or to experience a thing? If someone possesses a fantasy or desire for someone it is common to say that they "lust after" that person. A person may lust after a supermodel, but that is different than a reference to that person experiencing a specific daydream about that supermodel. So it might all depend on tense.
Metaphor is also common in this area where direct description many be impolite. A person can be smitten or enchanted by someone. Or they can carry a candle.
The two most common off my head: Colloquially, and somewhat innocently, "crushed [on]". Modern internet "Urban" colloquially, and certainly degeneratively, "fapped [to]".
Lots of modern variations abound. "squished [on]" when more romantically/asexually. Couples (usually strictly monogamous) may allow each other a "hall pass", which is a noun for someone that is an (often unattainable) sexual fantasy. ("He is my hall pass.")
I think languages in general pick up a lot of nuanced terms for these kinds of things, far more than just a single transitive verb. Especially because things like sexual interest are often "forbidden" from discussion in "polite society", so a lot of it starts as euphemisms or analogies and maybe never leaves. "Hall pass" is a euphemism from childhood school days that seems to have stuck for a very specific niche.
You can find a lot of variation in places like Urban Dictionary. It can be fun to try to find old slang dictionaries from previous eras to see how much things have shifted over time. (Euphemisms tend to, especially as jobs or technologies shift out from whatever is being euphemized.)
71 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadAlso: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorder_(musical_instrument)#... has a full etymology, which contradicts the article.
The etymology you reference seems speculative, not really contradicting the article's claim that the etymology isn't clear.
There are many, but the word is somewhat amorphous. Personally, I would call almost anything that uses a Helmholtz resonator instigated with the mouth as the initial oscillator a "flute," but will also take it to mean "orchestral flute" based on guessed context in conversation.
The thing that makes clarinets and oboes not flutes is that they have one or more reeds rather than producing a direct Helmholtz resonator.
http://www.colinpykett.org.uk/how_the_flue_pipe_speaks.htm
I think a better definition of a flute is a mouth-blown wind instrument with no vibrating parts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dizi_(instrument)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daegeum
These are uncontroversially flutes, so the definition would have to be "mouth-blown wind instruments that generate a tone without using vibrating parts".
I've always thought that 'boy' sounded suspiciously close to the Swiss German translation "bueb" (or sometimes "buebe"), almost pronounced "b-way-b"
https://glosbe.com/en/gsw/boy
According to Etymology Online[0]:
`boy (n.)
mid-13c., boie "servant, commoner, knave" (generally young and male); c. 1300, "rascal, ruffian, knave; urchin," mid-14c. as "male child before puberty" (possibly extended from the "urchin" sense). A word of unknown origin.
Possibly from Old French embuie "one fettered," from Vulgar Latin imboiare, from Latin boia "leg iron, yoke, leather collar," from Greek boeiai dorai "ox hides." (Words for "boy" double as "servant, attendant" across the Indo-European map — compare Italian ragazzo, French garçon, Greek pais, Middle English knave, Old Church Slavonic otroku — and often it is difficult to say which meaning came first.)
But it also appears to be identical with East Frisian boi "young gentleman," and perhaps with Dutch boef "knave," from Middle Dutch boeve, perhaps from Middle Low German buobe. This suggests a gradational relationship to babe. Another conjecture:
Used slightingly of young men in Middle English, also in familiar or contemptuous use of criminal toughs or men in the armed services. In some local uses "a man," without reference to age (OED lists "in Cornwall, in Ireland, in the far West of the U.S."). The meaning "male negro slave or Asian personal servant of any age" attested from c. 1600.Extended form boyo is attested from 1870. Emphatic exclamation oh, boy is attested by 1917. Boy-meets-girl "typical of a conventional romance" is from 1945; the phrase itself is from 1934 as a dramatic formula. Boy-crazy "eager to associate with males" is from 1923.
`[0] https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=boy
https://www.dictionary.com/e/borrowed-words/
The reason why is mostly a bootstrapping problem. The purpose of words is communication, and it's a lot easier to adapt an existing word to a new purpose that it is to just invent some new pattern of sounds and convince people to start using it. It's easier now with mass media, but prior to that, nearly impossible.
For every "Zyrtec" (which still plays on "tech") you have "Claritin" ("clear/clarity") and others.
It's hard to find a word that is a truly original coinage not based on any existing words.
I’m thinking of things like “a parliament of owls” or “a murder of crows”.
[0] https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/
His voice is quite soothing, and it's interesting enough to constantly hold your attention, while not being _so_ interesting that it keeps you awake, and while it's loosely organized chronologically on an episode-by-episode basis, within each episode it's sort of arranged thematically, so you can dip in and out of consciousness and not be confused as to what he's talking about, and you can pick it up the next night at some random spot and not really feel like you missed much. It also has long stretches where he's just sort of listing off words and etymologies, which are the kinds of trivial facts I love, but I think my brain also takes as a signal to turn off.
Eventually, I gave up. I’m not one of his backers, so he doesn’t owe me anything, but I would have preferred it if he did something more like Dan Carlin (there are plenty of quibbles about his historiography, but you have to admit he’s very good at storytelling), doing deep dives on various subjects instead of beating Middle and early Modern English to death. Yes, they were very important times in the language, where the mostly-comprehensible Middle English turned into the entirely-comprehensible (if you have footnotes for words whose meaning has changed and cultural references that no longer apply) early Modern English, but the language hasn’t been static since 1500.
Another usage is for supervising professors who attend a lecture to "audit" it in the sense that an IRS auditor would audit a tax return. They are examining the junior professor's performance or adherence to guidelines.
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12608-when-i-use-a-word-hum...
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.” ― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Have a wonderful day!
However, to OP: a facetious response quoting literature is quite unkind. While you may feel that 'audit' means something particular, the fact is that it has a couple of definitions and none of them are immediately apparent (to me, a native speaker).
It's also quite prone to being used as a 'false friend' for something who speaks romance languages in which the normal verb for 'listen' is close to the Latin.
Bear in mind that this is the internet, and no-one can be sure whether English is anyone's first language. As an external observer, I can't tell if you are a native English speaker, and I cannot tell whether the person asking the question is a native English speaker.
A better way to approach the question would have been just to give the benefit of the doubt and answer simply and clearly.
(BTW: there's some interesting discussion of your point of view here: https://blog.oup.com/2022/11/the-return-of-humpty-dumpty-who...)
Great book!
I find it difficult to believe that we don't have a good word for what 99+% of people are doing since puberty and allows also to express the object of the fantasy using a simple subject+verb+object type of sentence.
Same with words for copulation (highly restricted) and even for wooing / courting, which are also pretty universal activities since times immemorial.
My response to your finding it difficult to believe is: you're asking for a word for an intensely private act! Think about how rarely people overtly and bluntly say they are sexually fantasizing about someone. When it's actually admitted to, it's done using a variety of metaphors, slang and indirect hints.
And in general, we don't have a commonly used prefix or second compounded word to turn a physical act into a fantasy. Even though "fuck" predates Early Modern there was nothing commonly attached to it to make it mental.
If you really want a single verb, "lust."
For sexual fantasies about somebody one's looking at, "undressing with one's eyes."
Auto-tagging/making clickable certain proper nouns like Homelander could be neat if there’s a way to detect them.
Metaphor is also common in this area where direct description many be impolite. A person can be smitten or enchanted by someone. Or they can carry a candle.
Lots of modern variations abound. "squished [on]" when more romantically/asexually. Couples (usually strictly monogamous) may allow each other a "hall pass", which is a noun for someone that is an (often unattainable) sexual fantasy. ("He is my hall pass.")
I think languages in general pick up a lot of nuanced terms for these kinds of things, far more than just a single transitive verb. Especially because things like sexual interest are often "forbidden" from discussion in "polite society", so a lot of it starts as euphemisms or analogies and maybe never leaves. "Hall pass" is a euphemism from childhood school days that seems to have stuck for a very specific niche.
You can find a lot of variation in places like Urban Dictionary. It can be fun to try to find old slang dictionaries from previous eras to see how much things have shifted over time. (Euphemisms tend to, especially as jobs or technologies shift out from whatever is being euphemized.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/8qdnpu/what_are_...
0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kill
1: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/boy
Or more generally from uralic languages, example Finnish: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/poika
ボーイ: Borrowed from English boy
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pojke