Look Closer
If you're thinking about a word and you pay more attention to how it sounds than to how it looks, you can be led right down the garden path.
This morning the words "species" and "specie" popped into my head, followed in short order by "specious". The first two were obviously cousins, and it seemed pretty clear that the third was at least distantly related, though I had no idea how.
I definitely should have been looking at them rather than just thinking about them, because--as should probably have been obvious--they're all also related to the word "spectacle"; that is to say, they all reflect some aspect of looking.
"Species" originally meant "outward form or appearance"--that is to say, what something looks like. Its meaning eventually shifted to the modern one, "a category", which still retains a shadow of its earlier meaning: things that look alike to us are considered part of the same species, informally if not biologically. "Specie", which means "money" or, more specifically, "coin", first meant "in kind"--that is to say, "an exchange of something which is like something else".
"Specious", in retrospect, is the most obviously related to "spectacle" (from Latin "spectare", "to watch"): something specious is something which looks like the real deal, but isn't. (Jim just asked me about "spectacle", which is to say a thing worth looking at, and then he mentioned "speculum", which is a device used to look into something. I've already talked about "spectre", "specimen", and "spectrum", so you'd think I might have figured out "species" on my own.)
This morning the words "species" and "specie" popped into my head, followed in short order by "specious". The first two were obviously cousins, and it seemed pretty clear that the third was at least distantly related, though I had no idea how.
I definitely should have been looking at them rather than just thinking about them, because--as should probably have been obvious--they're all also related to the word "spectacle"; that is to say, they all reflect some aspect of looking.
"Species" originally meant "outward form or appearance"--that is to say, what something looks like. Its meaning eventually shifted to the modern one, "a category", which still retains a shadow of its earlier meaning: things that look alike to us are considered part of the same species, informally if not biologically. "Specie", which means "money" or, more specifically, "coin", first meant "in kind"--that is to say, "an exchange of something which is like something else".
"Specious", in retrospect, is the most obviously related to "spectacle" (from Latin "spectare", "to watch"): something specious is something which looks like the real deal, but isn't. (Jim just asked me about "spectacle", which is to say a thing worth looking at, and then he mentioned "speculum", which is a device used to look into something. I've already talked about "spectre", "specimen", and "spectrum", so you'd think I might have figured out "species" on my own.)
posted by pyramus | 7:07 AM
1 Comments:
It is staggeringly fecund, isn't it? "Specific", "prospector", "especial", "speculation"--pretty much every English word that contains "-spec-" except "speck" and its relative "speckle". And then we have through a vowel change "conspicuous" and "despicable" ("to be looked down upon"), and, from a related Greek word, "skeptic" and "telescope", not to mention "spy". It's nearly endless.
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