etymologies of "wisdom teeth"
I was googling like a happy camper and found this on wiki:
"They are generally thought to be called wisdom teeth because they appear so late-much later than the other teeth, at an age where people are wiser than as a child, when the other teeth erupt.
The English wisdom tooth is derived from Latin dens sapientiae."
Apparently its shared by like twenty other languages (dent de sagesse in French, dente del giudizio in Italian, both of which may come in handy this year...) Also interesting is this:
"There exists an interesting Dutch folk etymology that the Dutch word verstandskies is derived from "far-standing" (ver-staand) molar, and that mistranslations of the Dutch word (in which verstand translates to wisdom) are the root for corresponding words in other European languages."
but outside romance languages it gets a lot more poetic:
"20 year tooth" in Turkish; "the tooth of the mind" [one of my favourites for sure] in Arabic, "Unknown to the parents" in Japanese [also pretty damn cool], "huddling tooth" in Thai and, the coolest by far:
" In Korean, its name is Sa-rang-nee (사랑니, love teeth) referring to the young age and the pain of the first love. "
Wordsareawesome.
"They are generally thought to be called wisdom teeth because they appear so late-much later than the other teeth, at an age where people are wiser than as a child, when the other teeth erupt.
The English wisdom tooth is derived from Latin dens sapientiae."
Apparently its shared by like twenty other languages (dent de sagesse in French, dente del giudizio in Italian, both of which may come in handy this year...) Also interesting is this:
"There exists an interesting Dutch folk etymology that the Dutch word verstandskies is derived from "far-standing" (ver-staand) molar, and that mistranslations of the Dutch word (in which verstand translates to wisdom) are the root for corresponding words in other European languages."
but outside romance languages it gets a lot more poetic:
"20 year tooth" in Turkish; "the tooth of the mind" [one of my favourites for sure] in Arabic, "Unknown to the parents" in Japanese [also pretty damn cool], "huddling tooth" in Thai and, the coolest by far:
" In Korean, its name is Sa-rang-nee (사랑니, love teeth) referring to the young age and the pain of the first love. "
Wordsareawesome.