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"Robot" is most probably from the Czech word robota, meaning originally the time that a serf would have to spend tilling his lord's lands rather than cultivating his own property, and is earliest attested in RUR, a play by Karel Capek. The disaffected, hoodie-wearing youth of the the Czech Republic, I believe, refer to the low-status, low-interest jobs that they are forced to perform in the very shops from which the wearing of a hoodie will ultimately deny them access as consumers as their robota.
Caligula is a diminutive form of caliga, the soldier's nailed sandal. Tacitus, in the Annals, and Suetonius, in his Lives of the Caesars, trace this etymology to his tendency as a child to dress as a soldier when accompanying his family in military campaigns. This is the kind of thing that you would expect to get old very quickly, but apparently the soldiers found it rather endearing.
Nero was indeed Nero's real name, but only in the sense that he changed it to Nero - Claudius apparently gave him this name, but this fact was generally decried and denied, Claudius' stock not being very high at the time (although Claudius ended up deified and Nero didn't, so ultimately the moral victory probably goes to the stammerer). Before this he was known as Lucius Domitius Aenobarbus. The Aenobarbi were a spectacularly unimaginative family, calling all their male chldren either Lucius or Cneius. One of the two noble offshoots of the Domitii, the Aenobarbi took their name from a distinguished ancestor whose beard was turned from black to red in colour by the stroking of a pair of unidentified divinities, this stroking being, however, in no way erotic. So, he became known as Aenobarbus (brazen beard), and this posterity marched down the ages. Other such nicknames, such as Cicero, named for the cicer or chickpea, did not last so long.
Speaking of pairs, Nero upheld the tradition of good brother, bad brother by having a brother, Britanicus, who has been credited with almost all the virtues known to man in the way that only those who die unfulfilled can be - see also the tragic Marcellus. My favourite bit of Britannicus-praising is this, without a doubt, if only for its insanity:
He was so extremely mild and gentle to his enemies, whoever they were, or on what account soever they bore him enmity, that, although Piso rescinded his decrees, and for a long time severely harassed his dependents, he never showed the smallest resentment, until he found himself attacked by magical charms and imprecations; and even then the only steps he took was to renounce all friendship with him, according to ancient custom, and to exhort his servants to avenge his death, if any thing untoward should befal him.
The Piso mentioned here belonged, IIRC, to one of the unluckiest dynasties of the first century AD, a Piso being killed by almost every single emperor from Claudius onwards. This unhappy sequence terminated, along with the young Piso Licinianus, when, four days after his adoption as successor to Galba, he was beheaded by the troops of Otho, whom fate and the military made the actual successor to Galba. The bucking of this trend was Licinius Crassus Scribonianus, to whom leadership of the Empire was offered by Antonius Primus, at this point commander of the Seventh Legion, I think, and power-broker during the year of the Four Emperors, but declined, possibly realising that if life for a Piso under the emperors was often abbreviated, life for a Piso as emperor would be vanishingly short indeed. He chose instead life as a private citizen.
"Private citizen" is also what the Ancient Greek word idiotes (ιδιωτησ ) means, from idios, meaning "private" or "personal". This drives the ambiguiity of the term - an idiotes can be an individual, an "average man", and thus by extension a layman or man without particular skills, and so, ultimately, a fool.
Attempts to tell other people what they should and should not find offensive are often ill-fated, as such luminaries on this board as Aus and Duncan Falconer have maintained that terminology x is, in effect, only offensive when people other than themselves use it, because they are, then, using it wrongly. No case has ever been made for "Jap", in those terms, but in the Duncanverse it might reasonably be termed a "descriptive diminutive". In this case, it is a diminutive of "Japanese", which does indeed have no immediate connection to Nihon, but is instead appropriated from the Portuguese Japao, which was used after, I assume, some Portuguese traders asked some Chinese people what was the land east of their coastline and received an answer something akin (forgive my poor transliteration) to jih pung - the source of the sun.
"The House of the Rising Sun" is a traditional song made famous by the Animals, who changed its defining quality to that of being the ruin of many a poor boy, rather than the more traditional runiation of many a poor girl. It is reasonable too say that a young woman of marriageable age (in Hebrew, an almah) going in would be unlikely to remain a virgin (in Hebrew, a bethulah) for very long. The Ancient Greek for bethulah is parthenos, as discussed above - where "virgin" and "unmarried young woman" were socially interchangeable. Now, the prophecy in the book of Isiah that a virgin would give birth (a reference, of course, to Anakin Skywalker). Matthew specifically references the prophecy of Isaiah when he describes the birth of a child from a virgin (parthenos), writing in Greek (koine, not ancient, but the word is the same). In the Septuagint, the Greek translation of, among other things, the Book of Isaiah, almah is translated as parthenos, which might be where all this confusion began.
The Animals, of course, were largely unconcerned by this, and indeed by the fact that they would in their living state be described in words of Anglo-Saxon derivation and, once slaughtered and cooked, in words of Norman derivation. It was the slaughtering they objected to primarily. |
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