conuly

The rant comes from this:

Sometimes, people complain about the spelling "wymyn". To be perfectly fair, I think it's a stupid spelling. The pronunciation of the word doesn't change, and it violates normal English spelling rules. However, I don't care enough to mention it to anyone because, really, I understand why people do that (even if I know the etymology of the word, they often do too) and it's just not a big deal.

However, I *do* get pissed at those who try to correct/defend this practice by bringing up the word "huMAN". *deep sigh* Woman and man come from the word "man/mon" in old english. It's a germanic word. I'm told (though I really don't care to do the research myself and could easily be wrong) that for a while "man" just meant something like "person" and sex was distinguished using "werman" and "wifman". Wifman became woman (and wif became wife), the wer from werman only survives in werewolf. Human, on the other hand, comes from humanus, related to homo (not homo like homosexual, homo like homo sapiens), which is a LATIN word. They both are. Human and man/woman aren't related, they just sound alike because of coincidence.

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Appreciative post:

In a response to my faceblind post over at

asperger, I used the phrase "sandblind, not stoneblind". Sandblind means "half-blind", stoneblind means "blind", pebbleblind is in between. Sandblind is, according to my dictionary, the original word, the others were formed in the same pattern. However, sandblind has nothing to do with sand. It comes from sam-blind, where sam means, according to my recollection of the etymology (always shaky) half. But once it became "sand", pebble and stone were quick to follow. I always thought that was cute/funny and love having a chance to use the words.

The first person to see the connection between the two points gets a gold star. If you manage to CORRECTLY correct me, with the appropriate reference, you get a smiley face sticker too. How I loved those smiley face stickers....