Guest Post 1: On gatherings and British Humour

It’s often natural, not to say fulfilling, to cross paths with some interesting individuals on your strolls who end up making it special. Every so often we’ll be bumping onto such people on our walk around words. The first of such is @etymologydaily. He was one of the persons who got me started off with this journey, is way more technically sound with the subject, and has gladly agreed for our very first guest post. Talking to him, he had some very strong opinions on British humour.

 

“The Latin Language had an extremely small basic vocabulary, so compounding, and metaphors play an important role. For today’s ‘special’ let’s take a look at the stem (or root) “greg- “, which means a “flock/group”. A common trick you can use to turn a Latin verb into a related English noun is by adding common prepositional prefixes to them.  For example, the root “con-” meaning “with” makes up congregation. The same can be done with the prefixes “ad- “meaning “towards” coming together to make aggregation and “se- “or “away” making segregation.

 

A similar route for adjectives would entail adding a suffix of “-ious” or “-ic” instead of “-ion”. So we have gregarious (of the herd), egregious (that’s a mutation of “ex- “ or out + “greg-“ which simply means distinguished from the herd). However, do note an interesting difference: whereas Romance languages have maintained the positive sense of the word, the negative sense in English arose in the 16th century due to sarcasm. And if you think that doesn’t say a thing or two about what the British find funny, then I raise you some Monty Python.”