The etymology of the word great is that it comes from an old Germanic word, grautaz, which meant ,”coarse.” In Old English, the word great meant, “big, tall, stout, thick, or massive” and didn’t come to mean, “excellent or wonderful” until 1848 in America.
So if we take the original meaning of the word, I think we can all agree that Trump is indeed making America great again, in that it is definitely becoming more coarse and thick.
Etymology Lesson: hope
From Old English, hopa meaning, “wish, expectation.”
There are theories that it is related to the word hop, as in, “leaping forward in expectation.” In the myth of Pandora’s Box, the last evil to escape the box is Hope. Some say hope is what saves the world, some say there is a reason it was locked inside the box with all the other evils. Hope is a dangerous siren, luring us to believe in things that will never be. Tempting us to betray our instincts and abandon our better intellect, blindly trusting that things will turn out the way we wish them to, instead of accepting the truth of what they are.
Wednesday Etymology Lesson: family
This one was suggested by my sister Abigail and is holiday appropriate.
Family is our word today. The word comes from the Latin famula, and is related to the word familiar. It was originally used to describe all of the members of a household, and in particular, the servants in the household, and wasn’t used to describe actual blood relatives until the mid 1500s in England. The Latin word for “family,” as we use it in English, was domus. You’ll recognize the words domestic and domicile coming from domus. Previous to using family, English-speaking people referred to their close blood relatives in Old English as hiwscipe, a word now forgotten. I’m thankful that tomorrow I will get to see many of my hiwscipe and feast with them for American Thanksgiving.
Wednesday Morning Etymology Lesson: Dream
Because I had some vivid ones last night, today’s word is dream, which has a somewhat dissatisfying etymology for traditional linguists, in that the Old English word dream meant “joy, mirth, noisy merriment” and no one can really figure out why in the mid 13th century it came to mean “sleeping vision” instead. Theories include a borrowing from the Old Norse word draumr which comes from a Proto-Germanic word draugmaz, meaning “festivity, dream, ghost, hallucination, delusion, deception.” My own personal theory has to do with olde-timey festivals being closely tied with substance imbibing which would likely lead to “sleeping visions,” should one be feeling festive enough.
Word Nerd 