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A DECEPTIVE ENTRY

2/11/2017

1 Comment

 
A requested word! Deception may not be what it appears (hee hee hee). The word comes from French decepcion, with the same definition. This, as many French borrowings in English, comes from Latin. Through some conjugations, this can be traced back to the Latin word decipere, which meant "to cheat or trick someone", very similar to deception. Decipere was a portmanteau of de-, "from" and capere, which meant "to take" and is also the root of everything from forceps to intercept. The connection between "take" and "trick" is hard to etymologize; at a glance it doesn't seem to make sense. I researched it a bit further, and some scholars out there believe that there is a philosophical connection between the two because one who decieves​ is one who "takes" a mind and twists it around to their will. Capere traces to Proto-Italic kapio, and that is reconstructed further to Proto-Indo-European kahp, which could loosely be defined as "grasp", since when you "grasp" something you "take" it. The point of all this is, etymologies can be deceptive.
1 Comment
Mary
2/22/2017 08:59:18 am

hee hee hee

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    AUTHOR

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    Hello! I'm Adam Aleksic, a senior studying government and linguistics at Harvard University, where I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy trivia, politics, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law. 
      If I don't cover it soon, I probably already did it
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