The Film Noir Experience

In the class I am teaching, we have been talking about Grimm’s and Verner’s laws (or the first sound shift, if you will.) I was looking for some more examples to show my students and I found this:

Amazing!

So, I feel like I had a little victory yesterday. I was walking from one part of campus to another with new of the students in the class I’m teaching on the history of English and we were chatting. In the first class we talked bout the history of three different words in English that are synonymous (or at least partially so): ersatz, faux and fake. We looked at the earliest cited usage and some collocates and their roots. They both said that they had never seen ersatz before I wrote it up on the board in class.

And, then one of them said that she was reading a book for fun and came across it. She was pleased that she knew what it meant. And, I am pleased that I’m a nerd who likes words and that I was able to share it with her. It is a little thing, I know, but sometimes little things make you smile.

So, I’m teaching a class on the Roots of English. Today, we looked at the morphology of English. One of the books I’m using is English Vocabulary Elements. And, at some point in the book it mentions that the morpheme “phile” in “bibliophile” and “pedophile” both mean “love”. They come from the same place. But, the words take that meaning in different directions. People who are bibliophiles really enjoy books. They love them. People who are pedophiles…well, they really enjoy children; they love them. *shiver*. They just love them in a way that is illegal and, in my humble opinion, wrong (and more than a little gross.)

And, this made me think. “phil” is a root we get from Greek, and I thought it meant a “brotherly sort of love”. The kind of love that is romantic is “eros”, where we get our word for “erotic”. So, shouldn’t “pedophile” be “pedoerotic” or “eroped” or something like that?

Elements of vocabulary…English Vocabulary.