Cephalogenic

or, stuff that I dragged out of my head

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Location: Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada

Saturday, January 05, 2008

I Thought Not

As I asked yesterday, is it possible that Latin "imputus", "grafted shoot", derived from Greek "emphytos", "implanted, grafted", the adjectival form of the verb "emphyein", "to implant", is related somehow to English "impute"?

No.

I noted a year ago that "impute" is related to "compute" ("think about"), "repute" (what others think of you), "putative" ("thought to be"), and other thinky words, through a series of linguistic metamorphoses that started with Indo-European "peu-", "to cut, to prune", which led to Latin "putare", originally "to cut, to strike", which led to such words as "amputate", to cut off, and "pit", a hole cut out of the ground.

That was easy!

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