Re: GnuTLS in Debian

[Tollef Fog Heen <tfheen@err.no>]

]] Russ Allbery 

Wildly off-topic, but hey. :-)

> Yeah, I saw that also in Bernhard's reply.  That confusion had honestly
> never occurred to me before since, despite the visual similarities, the
> words are completely unrelated in English.  The etymologies are disjoint:
> idiot comes from French and hence from Latin and dates back to the 1400s,
> whereas idiosyncratic has an independent derivation from Greek root words
> meaning "mixed together" and has existed independently with roughly its
> current meaning since the 1600s.

Actually, idiot comes from greek too (from wikipedia):

  Idiot as a word derived from the Greek ἰδιώτης, idiōtēs («person
  lacking professional skill», «a private citizen», «individual»), from
  ἴδιος, idios («private», «one's own»).[1] In Latin the word idiota
  («ordinary person, layman») preceded the Late Latin meaning
  «uneducated or ignorant person».[2] Its modern meaning and form dates
  back to Middle English around the year 1300, from the Old French
  idiote («uneducated or ignorant person»). The related word idiocy
  dates to 1487 and may have been analogously modeled on the words
  prophet[3] and prophecy.[4][5] The word has cognates in many other
  languages.

  An idiot in Athenian democracy was someone who was characterized by
  self-centeredness and concerned almost exclusively with private—as
  opposed to public—affairs. [...]

I think they have the same root too, roughly «individual», which fits
well with the definition of idiosyncratic too.

> I'm sorry for the confusion for non-native speakers.  English has a
> bad habit of drawing words from all sorts of different languages and
> thus creating a lot of accidental similarities between words that have
> no relationship to each other.

I don't think you can blame English for ancient Greek being
confusing. :-)

-- 
Tollef Fog Heen
UNIX is user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are