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WELL-BORN

9/12/2017

1 Comment

 
Everybody remembers eugenics as the Nazi attempt to kill off anyone who was not contributing to society the way they wanted. Considering all the nasty deaths involved, the origin is quite the oxymoron. Though eugenics were practiced in Ancient Greece (think Sparta), the word itself comes from Greek but not directly: it was coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton, who attributed the Greek word eugenes ("well born") to the purpose (the theory, of course, being that eugenics would culminate in a better born and bred super-race). The prefix of that word is eus ("good"), from Proto-Indo-European hes, "to be". Meanwhile, the root is gignomai, which meant "breeding" and is from Proto-Indo-European genh ("to beget", also the root of gene, you may recall). Though eugenics as a practice has decreased recently, usage of the word has increased significantly, almost to the previous maximum in the early 1900s.
1 Comment
Mary
2/23/2020 09:20:28 am

Hey! Cool site! Is it possible to make is so we can search words to see if you wrote on it?
So far, what I do is I google-search your blog name with the desired word, but I'm not sure if that is thorough.

I'm trying to write a paper for school right now on the different meanings of the words race and ethnicity and my head is in a knot. I'm hoping to get to the etymology of the words, to sort out the various contemporary uses. Also, I wonder how the words tribe and culture were formed, to better explore how to speak precisely.

I'm walking a razor's edge, I tell ya!

Anyways, it's fun come across projects like yours. Carry on!

Mary

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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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