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English is weird
Morituri:
This morning I woke up considering the relationship between the words "Deception" and "Deceased." They sound like they sure ought to be related. Perhaps by the concept of "cessation."
But if that were the case, I can think of a few people who ought to be falling over dead any day now.
"Deceased" sounds like the past tense of an active verb. For example you could decease ants by stepping on them. If that were the case, then the act of deceasing the ants would be called deception. Which sort of offers a possible etymology, in that often someone must be deceived in order to decease them.
And it may relate to deception in another way. Once deceased, the ants are no longer ontologically valid. It no longer makes sense for them to be the subject of a sentence with an active verb. So a statement that the ants do or are doing anything is, prima facie, false, and if presented as truth amounts to a deception.
This sort of thing wanders through my mind between being asleep and awake.
cybersmurf:
Well, if you cease to live, you're deceased. Kind of weird to go from cease to de-cease, which feels like meaning some kind opposite.
While "deception" is bound to "to deceive", I don't see how it could be connected to cease though.
Funnily enough, transfer and translate come from the same Latino verb. Makes sense though, since translating is transferring text from one language to another. Weird thing though - "translatum" is the past participle of "transferre", which literally kept its meaning as "to transfer".
Tova:
--- Quote from: cybersmurf on 09 Mar 2019, 14:26 ---Well, if you cease to live, you're deceased. Kind of weird to go from cease to de-cease, which feels like meaning some kind opposite.
--- End quote ---
The de- in this case denotes 'away' rather than 'opposite'.
LeeC:
Does it bother anyone else when someone says or writes "All of a sudden" instead of "Suddenly" when conveying a story?
cybersmurf:
Well, that depends on the style. In normal conversation? Probably quite weird. except if you're telling some suspenseful story, I see 'all of a sudden' as a possibility.
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