Linguistic Fossils

[starshipcat]

Much as fossils help paleontologists understand the history of life on earth, linguistic fossils help us understand the development of our language. These fossils are words that once were productive in ordinary speech, but now survive in idioms and other fixed phrases. Some of them are unique, while others are synonyms to unrelated words that are

Comments

[whswhs]

And some of them either are misspelled, as when people write "reign in" instead of "rein in" (because so few people now have the experience of keeping a horse from running away with them), or change pronunciation, as when people say "you've got another thing coming" for "you've got another think coming" (perhaps because hardly anyone now uses the protasis, "if you think that").

[starshipcat]

Interesting. I'd only heard "thing," never "think" in that expression, and that goes back to my childhood. I'm wondering if any of my English teachers even realized that it was not the original form.

OTOH, "reign in" for "rein in" I've seen a lot, to the point I'm thinking the linguistic purists are fighting a rearguard action.

[whswhs]

Sometime around 1960, I read a comic book (probably Justice League of America) where Wonder Woman said of her adversary, "If she thinks that, she's got another think coming." That make perfect sense to me, as a joke about people who spoke ungrammatically. I didn't encounter "another thing" until the 1990s.

[davesmusictank]

It often fascinates me that certain words change their meaning overt time or at least get more nuanced such as gay