Grrr

[rochvelleth]

Some things annoy me, you might have noticed this. First today there's the 'How Stupid Are You?' Facebook application, which told me this:

You're an idiot! The word "idiot" is derived from a Latin word meaning "uneducated", and that's most likely what you are. But hey, some of the richest, most powerful people in history have been idiots... and

Comments

[ex_robhu]

I know it's very much the rage these days to advocate linguistic change and therefore say that anything you make up is acceptable if it is used by enough people
:P

I think it's half "I don't care if what I'm saying is wrongnew" and half about how we now understand and accept that language changes in this way. I wonder if the rate of language change is accelerating now that the braking the language mavens have always performed is no longer in vogue.

[rochvelleth]

People have been doing studies into the way linguistic changes have accelerated. I think partly it's because everyone is open to so many influences because of globalisation and TV and so on, and partly it's because of the increased speed of communication, with emails and information making their way across the interwebs almost instantanesouly. And maybe also partly due to new methods of communication, e.g. ones where it makes sense to abbreviate.

But personally I prefer to work on dead languages where you can just gather the data and make more positive statements about them because all the changes have already happened ;)

[ewx]

David Crystal manages, IIRC, to fill several pages with English grammatical changes dating from the 19th century, hardly a time when prescriptivism was out of fashion.

[ewx]

I don't think “completely wrong” is quite fair; truncated might be closer to the mark. etymonline has:

from O.Fr. idiote "uneducated or ignorant person," from L. idiota "ordinary person, layman," in L.L. "uneducated or ignorant person," from Gk. idiotes "layman, person lacking professional skill," lit. "private person," used patronizingly for "ignorant person," from idios "one's own"

The edition of the OED shipped by Apple has:

ORIGIN Middle English (denoting a person of low intelligence): via Old French from Latin idiota ‘ignorant person,’ from Greek idiōtēs ‘private person, layman, ignorant person,’ from idios ‘own, private.’

[rochvelleth]

That's interesting. IME, the Latin use of 'idiota' tends to be informed by knowledge of Greek, and I didn't think the shift to 'uneducated' was as marked as that suggests. The use of 'idiotes' in Greek definitely tends to have the extended sense I mentioned in the post, this is something that's been drummed into me :) But I don't know anything about the O.Fr. word and didn't realise that's where we get our version of 'idiot' from.

Now I'm wondering how good the evidence is for the tradition of this word. So often the consensus is based on a number of unlinked attestations and then they try to link them up by the most likely path. But then I'm sure the OED at least must have some good reason for asserting the tradition it does (I don't know much about etymonline's sources!) :)

Thank you for that! :)

[ewx]

etymonline lists its main sources on its front page and has a full list here. I do often look things up both there and somewhere else, out of a general feeling that printed material is likely to be better researched than online (though being well aware that this isn't always the case and also that both can be simultaneously wrong!)

The Apple-shipped OED (NOAD2) is also very handy but I don't have a Mac at work so I can only conveniently use that as a reference from home. I regard its likelihood of accuracy as equivalent to printe since it's an electronic edition of a long-establish print work, rather than something done new for the web.

[ladyshrew]

Thank you.

[rochvelleth]

For the idiot bit or the whom bit? :)