Where do new words come from? by Marcel Danesi was one of my favorite videos in the "Language" set. I learned some new things like "villain" originally meant a peasant farmer and "geek" meant a carnival performer. I also learned that 1,000 new words are added to the Oxford English Dictionary each year. I have always passively thought of language as evolving very slowly, but this number seems to contradict what I believed. Really thinking about it, it makes sense that so many new words are added - we are in a society that is rapidly evolving with technology, social trends, etc. and new vocabulary is going to come with these things.
How did English evolve? by Kate Gardoqui was a video that really blew my mind. It proposed two sentences at the beginning: "They gave us a hearty welcome" and "They gave us a cordial reception." Painting a mental image of these two pictures, I imagined the first one to be a comfy home setting, like the family of a friend welcoming me into their home with a southern cooked meal. For the latter, I imagined a much more fancy setting with attendees dressed nicely in a dining hall perhaps. I figure most people will think this way too (and the video agreed with me on that), but I thought "it's just because of the connotation of the words, no big deal..." Little did I know, "hearty" and "welcome" are Saxon words, whereas "cordial" and "reception" are French. For a period of centuries in the past, French-speaking people took over England. French became the language of the wealthy aristocrats, and peasants spoke old English. That is why a more "fancy" connotation is attached to the term cordial reception. I naturally understood this connotation the whole time without truly knowing the origin, and I think that is an amazing thing about language.
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