Words for Granted - An etymology and linguistics podcast

The Modern English word 'apology' derives from the Ancient Greek word apologia. However, in the Ancient Greek work known as Plato's Apology, Plato doesn't 'apologize' for anything––at least not in the modern sense. That's because an 'apology' was originally a self-defensive manner of speech. In this episode, we look at how this rhetorical technique developed into an expression of sincere regret.

In Modern English, sophistication is a desirable characteristic. However, the word derives from sophistry, an Ancient Greek intellectual movement with a historically bad reputation. In today's episode, we consider this bad reputation from various perspectives and how it has impacted the development of 'sophistic' words over the course of history.

In the pre-modern world, philosophy referred to all forms of intellectual knowledge. Today, the discipline of philosophy is just one aspect of the traditional field of philosophia, or 'love of knowledge.'

The pronoun 'they' was borrowed into English from Old Norse. Pronouns within a language tend to be conservative over time, so this borrowing of a foreign pronoun into English is a bit unusual. In today's episode, we explore the entire history of "they," from its roots as a Proto-Germanic demonstrative adjective to its modern usage as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun in English.

Subjectification is a unique linguistic process by which a word evolves to reflect the subjective viewpoint of the speaker using it. For example, the word 'very' used to mean 'true,' but over time, it lost its objectivity and merely became a way of emphasizing subjectivity. In this episode, we explore this process in a broad sense and look at a few more examples. Further reading: https://web.stanford.edu/~traugott/resources/TraugottDavidseIntersbfn.pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.1028.5275&rep=rep1&type=pdf

The word 'the' is the sole definite article in the English language. It's also the most common word in our language. However, for such a grammatically fundamental word, its history isn't as straightforward as one might think. Old English had a whopping twenty different forms of the definite article, all of which collapsed into the single, versatile word 'the' by the time of Modern English. We discuss some of these older forms and their evolutions.

In this conversation, Steve and I discuss the linguistic influence of the King James Bible and some common English idioms that have Biblical etymologies.

Adverbs ending in the -ly suffix are all contractions hiding in plain sight. -ly is cognate with the word 'like,' and indeed, it literally means … 'like.' Sadly is literally sad-like. Madly is literally mad-like. Amazingly, both 'like' and '-ly' derive from a root word meaning 'body or corpse.' Over the course of this episode, we try to make sense of this semantic evolution.

To be or not to be? Well, if you're conjugating the verb, you're most likely using a form that does not sound like 'to be.' 'To be' is the most irregular verb in the English language, and in today's episode, we explore why this is the case.

Grammar is one of the defining features of language. In today's episode, we look at some of the fundamentals of grammar in general, and then take a brief tour through the historical evolution of English grammar itself. Part 1 in a five-part series.