Pondering, pondering.

[conuly]

A long time back, I asked why you couldn't buy seperate (separate? I hate that word) features without buying a full paid account, and got a nice, understandable answer about profit (basically, those features aren't worth enough for LJ to break even selling them alone).

Except now I'm thinking, what if they could be sold individually, but you had to buy a certain amount up front - maybe $5 or $10 dollars worth, however much that would be. Would this be possible and still profitable?

Hm. I might've asked that back then. If so, I completely forgot whatever I was told. Sorry.

Comments

Separate.

[ladytabitha.livejournal.com]

'separate', like 'disparate'.  se- and dis- both mean "apart, away", and apparently, the -parate part comes from parare, "to prepare".

Which is fun, because 'prepare' uses the parare root as well, where pre- means "before".  So to guess, 'compare' would be...

Huh!  'compare' comes from com-, "with" and par, "equal"!  So if one were to back-use that in the other words, it would come out to "apart" + "equal", and "before" + "equal".  Which makes sense if you think gistically - "apart" + "equal" would work out to mean "away from equal".  And "before" + "equal" would work out to mean "to make equal beforehand".

In faaact, dis- means things like absence of, opposite of.  So "absence of, opposite of" + "equal" does work out to the given definition of "fundamentally different in kind; entirely dissimilar".

Deeply Neat.

--

See, this is exactly why I started grammargasm.

Re: Separate.

[ladytabitha.livejournal.com]

Wow, this had nothing to do with your original post.  Beg leopards!

Re: Separate.

[bridgetester.livejournal.com]

And then there's the pure root of "pare", which seems to mean "to remove the outer covering, usually referring to food". Huh. I had just thought it was some form of "cutting"...