To accompany our !ifrickinglovescience pings I just created ping linguistics and architecture. Feel free to join
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etymologycels in
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The etymology of "etymology" derives from the original Greek: "etymon" meaning the true sense of a word and "logia" being the study of. !linguistics
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I blame the initial obsession squarely on this curriculum.
Unsure if public-schoolchads had similar courses, but it was nice to have a class that fostered a line of study into the assumed origins of words/phrases that I still find fascinating years later.
Helped a lot with being able to pinpoint cognates in other languages and wrap my mind around commonly used idioms.
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I'm also a privateschoolcel but a lot of Catholics and committed religious nerds in general (First Things style) do end up picking up enough Latin/Greek to care.
...or maybe it's just my autism.
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I'm not sure if a developmental disorder has much to do with it; I'm more likely to assume that if one is less socialized with others growing up, it's generally inevitable that the kid is more likely to end up honing in on/obsessing over focusing on how to correctly interact with others.
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I had an (actual, diagnosed long before current year craze) neurodivergent uncle who couldn't hold a job despite having a STEM PhD and inherited a number of actual linguistics textbooks and collated journal articles from him when he passed. I guess I just assumed there was a kinda tragic connection between his difficulty interacting with others and interest studying the actual form of language.
I almost went into speech-language pathology myself but the prereqs for the master's programs are quite specific so if you don't get accepted you're pretty fricked since bachelor's in bio related fields are worthless.
!linguistics do you guys have a touch of the 'tism or is it just my family?
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My dad was diagnosed with asperger's back in the late 1990s.
I will rabidly uphold that that isn't really autism as it's generally defined; he's clearly able to hold a generally normal and successful life without needing outside support.
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So I was right.
My uncle's situation was very sad, he wasn't quite an actual savant but he graduated with a bachelor's+master's from Virginia Tech with a 4.0 in his major (nuclear physics) in only three years and when I was helping my mom clear out his possessions we found letters from both MIT and Harvard written by professors to personally encourage him to study with them.
Reagan era budget cuts lost him his first job offer out of school to go be at Sandia Labs working with the Manhattan project
s and he became extremely socially abrasive/secluded/depressed permanently after. My dad was a doctor with the coast guard and also got cut right before his pension would've kicked in. 
@nuclearshill this is what your neolib economics did to my family. You should be ashamed.
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Based Ronald Reagan dunking on academiccels
!neolibs !anticommunists
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No, but there's a multilingual background in my family and my environment which sparked my interest in languages but nothing academic.
My maternal grandmother is a native German speaker, (a Moselle dialect to be more precise which is almost extinct in Germany but it's still spoken by elderly colonos in Brazil), my late paternal grandmother was an Argie, I live in the border next to two Spanish speaking countries and won't delve in details but I lived and worked there for a time as well. The city I live is also quite cosmopolitan and on this region there are arabs and chinese immigrants and I on my work I got in contact with a mennonite co-op and those guys speak Plattdietsch.
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As a child I wanted to go join the Amish but my dreams were lost when I discovered I'd need to learn an otherwise extinct Pennsylvania-Dutch dialect to even have a chance.
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You can have a taste of PA Dutch culture if you make these
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickled_beet_egg
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The mennonites are not like the Amish though. They have an austere way of living but unlike the Amish they use modern technology for work. The Co-op I met owned machinery for soil movement, they were a sub-contractor in the construction company I worked.
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Holy shit I was homeschooled with that same curriculum I remember the books
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