![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerThere's always a certain feeling of excitement when something clicks into place inside my head, like the world suddenly became slightly more exciting.
Even little things can have this effect, and one of the more common examples is etymology, where a word that's always been "just a word" suddenly becomes obviously made up of other words.
I'm reading a Sharpe book after Joe lent it to me, and there's some Spanish guerrilla fighters, who are referred to as fighting the "little war" (i.e. hit and run, short attacks, rather than thousands of troops at once). And I realised that, of course, guerrilla comes from guerr (war) only smaller (illa and ella and similar suffixes usual denote diminuation of the major word-part).
Suddenly "guerrilla" goes from being a random sound associated with certain types of fighting, to having a slightly poetic meaning and stronger connotations.
I love the feeling when words suddenly make sense.
Even little things can have this effect, and one of the more common examples is etymology, where a word that's always been "just a word" suddenly becomes obviously made up of other words.
I'm reading a Sharpe book after Joe lent it to me, and there's some Spanish guerrilla fighters, who are referred to as fighting the "little war" (i.e. hit and run, short attacks, rather than thousands of troops at once). And I realised that, of course, guerrilla comes from guerr (war) only smaller (illa and ella and similar suffixes usual denote diminuation of the major word-part).
Suddenly "guerrilla" goes from being a random sound associated with certain types of fighting, to having a slightly poetic meaning and stronger connotations.
I love the feeling when words suddenly make sense.
