this is a topic that i've tried to write about before but somehow i can't express it clearly into words and it just ends up sounding dumb. so i'm gonna try and keep it short.
do you ever wonder where certain words come from? obviously the majority of words have logical latin roots or are combinations of existing words or whatever. but there a lot of words that simply couldn't have been around when language was invented/discovered.
just off the top of my head, take the word paint. who the hell knows when paint was invented, but i'd guess sometime in the last millenium. so when the first carpenter or scientist or whoever came up with paint, where did he get the word from? did he just slap it on a wall and say, 'hey i think i'll call that paint!' it must have sounded totally strange at the time, but somehow it became part of our everyday vernacular.
some may say that all words have specific derivations and etymologies. okay but even if 'paint' came from something else, this dude probably didn't know about it, he's just some guy who invented paint, he wouldn't know about languages and derivations and all that. and sometimes a name is given to something and then the public renames it based on what they like because it catches on. well where would the masses get some random word like paint from?
this works for all kinds of words, mainly objects that are relatively recent addtions to our way of life. just look around your house. rug, window, cement, desk, pencil, curtain, fireplace. okay that last one was a joke. but surely, language was pretty set in stone by the time these things were introduced to society.
many i have posed this question to have dismissed it as a stupid question that probably has a simple answer. but if you can't tell so far, that could be the answer to a lot of my blogs.
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