Tell us why we should unexpectedly come to love your hobby.
Etymology is interesting, I agree. I also find language in general fascinating. You might consider studying some basic linguistics, either academically or via youtube. How language works is really interesting, IMHO.
I in fact have. I’ve always loved language, but it was not until college that I began studying it formally.
I started learning Lakota, Japanese, and Latin on top of my English and Spanish. And while I dropped Lakota from lack of resources and Japanese because I didn’t get along with the teacher, I stuck with the Latin and considered getting a minor in it. Just having Latin and Spanish to compare side-by-side was fascinating.
My main degree program was CS, though, and (dating myself here) the main problem in AI at the time was natural language processing, which means all of us in the AI specialization had to learn a lot about phonemes, read Noam Chomsky, and generally become linguistics nerds. That bubble burst my foury year, though, and left us scrambling for another problem in AI to study.
Since I didn’t end up using either my Latin or my linguistic modeling professionally, I rolled those interests into the hobbies of etymology and her dark cousin, the generation of neologisms.
generation of neologisms
Ngl, I had to look up what neologism meant, but now I know that it = new words, expressions or usages.
It fascinates me how fast language is changing. When I was young verse was never used as a verb, as in “today we are versing another team”.
Or the word “meme” has completely changed meaning in less than two decades. It’s like watch evolution on fast-forward.
