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Folk etymology is a productive process in historical linguistics, language change, and social interaction. [7] Reanalysis of a word's history or original form can affect its spelling, pronunciation, or meaning. This is frequently seen in relation to loanwords or words that have become archaic or obsolete.
The word's true origin is unknown, but it existed in the Middle Scots period. [32] [33] News: The word news has been claimed to be an acronym of the four cardinal directions (north, east, west, and south). However, old spellings of the word varied widely (e.g., newesse, newis, nevis, neus, newys, niewes, newis, nues, etc.).
The origin of any particular word is also known as its etymology. For languages with a long written history , etymologists make use of texts, particularly texts about the language itself, to gather knowledge about how words were used during earlier periods, how they developed in meaning and form , or when and how they entered the language.
The word folklore, a compound of folk and lore, was coined in 1846 by the Englishman William Thoms, [6] who contrived the term as a replacement for the contemporary terminology of "popular antiquities" or "popular literature". The second half of the word, lore, comes from Old English lār 'instruction'. It is the knowledge and traditions of a ...
Faggot, often shortened to fag, is a derogatory slur used to refer to gay men but expanded to other members of the queer community. [1] [2] In American youth culture around the turn of the 21st century, its meaning extended as a broader reaching insult more related to masculinity and group power structure.
The people of the Canadian Arctic are officially known as the Inuit, which means 'the people', or singularly, Inuk, which means 'the person', [47] as a result of the 1977 Inuit Circumpolar Conference. Canada's Constitution Act, 1982, uses "Inuit", as does the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national organization that represents the Inuit in Canada ...
Honky was adopted as a pejorative in 1967 by black militants within Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) seeking a rebuttal for the term nigger.The Department of Defense stated in 1967 that National Chairman of the SNCC, H. Rap Brown, told a Black audience in Cambridge that "You should burn that school down and then go take over the honkie's school" on June 24, 1967.
The plural form "people" is often used to refer to an entire nation or ethnic group (as in "a people"), and this was the original meaning of the word; it subsequently acquired its use as a plural form of person.