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Day: September 17, 2016

How did terms such as stoicism and cynicism come to adopt totally different meanings from their original Greek definitions?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-17 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, English, Linguistics

Sorry to answer by reference to Wikipedia, but, well, I think the answers are all there. We have ancient philosophical schools. We have popularisations of what those ancient philosophical schools were about, in education and in all-round educated discourse. We have people repurposing those popularisations, to express commonplace attitudes. To the extent that the meaning […]

Do I hyphenate “upper middle class family”, if yes, then how?

By: | Post date: 2016-09-17 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics, Writing Systems

Yes, hyphenation is less fashionable than it used to be, and yes, people think that it is finicky to introduce a distinction between two levels of punctuation. But may the fire of a thousand Harts and Fowlers rain down on all respondents, for not one of them suggesting as an alternative something involving an en-dash: […]