Post AXocqzAH4B10NutkSO by incrediblemelk@aus.social
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 (DIR) Post #AXocqzAH4B10NutkSO by incrediblemelk@aus.social
       2023-07-18T01:57:27Z
       
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       I was just thinking "can you have a figment of anything else but someone's imagination?" Turns out the word 'figment' is from the early C15th & could be used alone to mean an invented or imagined story – but it also carried negative connotations of deceit or false doctrineIt comes from the Latin 'figmentum', meaning something formed or fashioned, from the verb 'figurare', to form or shape (cf. "to make up a story"), and ultimately from a PIE root 'dheigh-' meaning to form or buildThis is the same root that gives us dough, feign, feint, fiction, effigy, paradise (yep! it means "[lovely place with a wall] made around [it]") & lady, as the Old English hlǣfdīġe means "bread-kneader", a job that fell to the female head of a householdquick sidetrack: in the C14th 'feint' was an adjective for weak/feeble, from the Old French verb 'feindre', "to hesitate, falter; lack courage". It's fossilised as a stationery trade term for pale ruled lines, in case you've wondered why exercise-book covers spell it that way!but most of all, 'dheigh-' gives us 'figure', "a visible or tangible shape or form of something". Such a rich word! My fave: the colloquial verb figure (out), "to expect or work out" comes from the maths sense of 'doing arithmetic', which in turn comes from numerals as shapes#Etymology