Posted by:
Lot's Wife
(
)
Date: August 18, 2023 03:42AM
. . . makes everything taste better.
Have you ever noticed that the best English words come from Germanic languages? Salient here would be a reference to "f**k," which is much rougher, even saltier, than those airy-fairy derivatives of French and Latin. Short, monosyllabic, begun and ended with consonants, guttural: aye, that's the stuff!
"Evil" too fits the Germanic pattern. An Anglo-Saxon term, clipped, brutal, unambiguous. It turns out, furthermore, that in old English there wasn't much religion to it. The word meant "extreme moral wickedness." Isn't that the usage for which we have been searching with regard to Hitler and others like him? Somehow the religious overlay came later; it is a modern perversion, like EOD's hookers and coke although arguably more philosophical.
An interesting detour arises when one discovers that "evil" goes even farther back, past Christianity and those quaint Germans to proto-Indo-European, showing up along the way in various guises in early Farsi, Sanskrit, and Hittite. This is bad news for your correspondent's theory that all the good English words come from German and not the Latinate languages, for are not those two categories sisters (if you are Germanic) or fraternal (if you are French)? And does that not mean the origins of the two lexicons are similar if not identical?
The answer, I venture, is that the basic words, roots, sources, were shared across the Indo-European ecumene but that they later diverged under the influence of the intervening cultures. So the Latinate words gradually assumed a gentler and more amorous tone--the language of the boudoir, if you will--while the Germanic peoples favored a rougher set of terms more appropriate to a barroom brawl. If that is so, perhaps we can judge a person's character by the relative frequency of Germanic and Latinate words in his or her active vocabulary--a sort of linguistic Briggs-Meyers test.
Speaking of which, where is Soft Machine, Germanic by birth but French by choice?
Anyone know if he's okay?
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/18/2023 04:01AM by Lot's Wife.