The most interesting thing about the word misanthropic ("disliking humanity") is that it's actually incorrect. The old form, misanthropical, would be laughed at today, but it was used at least a century and a half before the modern variation took over (because people used folk etymology to make it look like other words we know... never misunderestimate the power of people to create right-sounding new terms). Before that, we got the word from Greek misanthropos. Man, they had a term for every philosophy. Misanthropos in turn is a portmanteau of misein ("to hate"; from Proto-Indo-European mewh, "to complain") and anthropos, which we can recognize as the direct etymon of anthropology, and a variation of aner, "man", ultimately deriving from PIE ner, which had connections to the definition "man", "strong", and possibly "below"
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AUTHORHello! I'm Adam Aleksic. This year, I graduated from Harvard University with a degree in Government and Linguistics. There, I co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Linguistics Society and wrote a thesis on Serbo-Croatian language policy, magna cum laude. In addition to etymology, I also really enjoy philosophy, trivia, vexillology, geography, board games, conlanging, art history, and law.
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