On Words…And the Etymological Fallacy

Words are fascinating critters. They can grow and shrink. Then can revert, invert…sometimes convert. Some shift meanings easily and generate dozens, scores, even hundreds of possibilities; others, more niggardly with semantic change, hold rigidly to meanings a thousand years old. But beyond all, words have history. Etymologists, philologists, and lexicologists spend countless hours scouring ancient [...]