Friday, September 13, 2002
This is an email I sent Cap earlier today. I sent it to him since we both share a love for words. I figure i might as well immortalize my ramblings here:
i was walking around yesterday, and for no reason memorable enough to have stuck around in my brain, i was thinking about the word "amateur". it only occurred to me yesterday then that it's derived from the french word for lover ("one who loves"). this epiphany gave the word a whole new color for me. so i decided to do a little investigation. this is what i found on dictionary.com:
When Mrs. T.W. Atkinson remarked in her 1863 Recollections of the Tartar Steppes and their Inhabitants, “I am no amateur of these melons,” she used amateur in a sense unfamiliar to us. That sense, “a lover, an admirer,” is, however, clearly descended from the senses of the word's ultimate Latin source, am tor, “lover, devoted friend, devotee, enthusiastic pursuer of an objective,” and from its Latin-derived French source, amateur, with a similar range of meanings. First recorded in English in 1784 with the sense in which Mrs. Atkinson used it, amateur is found in 1786 with a meaning more familiar to us, “a person who engages in an art, for example, as a pastime rather than as a profession,” a sense that had already developed in French. Given the limitations of doing something as an amateur, it is not surprising that the word is soon after recorded in the disparaging sense we still use to refer to someone who lacks professional skill or ease in performance.
i was walking around yesterday, and for no reason memorable enough to have stuck around in my brain, i was thinking about the word "amateur". it only occurred to me yesterday then that it's derived from the french word for lover ("one who loves"). this epiphany gave the word a whole new color for me. so i decided to do a little investigation. this is what i found on dictionary.com:
When Mrs. T.W. Atkinson remarked in her 1863 Recollections of the Tartar Steppes and their Inhabitants, “I am no amateur of these melons,” she used amateur in a sense unfamiliar to us. That sense, “a lover, an admirer,” is, however, clearly descended from the senses of the word's ultimate Latin source, am tor, “lover, devoted friend, devotee, enthusiastic pursuer of an objective,” and from its Latin-derived French source, amateur, with a similar range of meanings. First recorded in English in 1784 with the sense in which Mrs. Atkinson used it, amateur is found in 1786 with a meaning more familiar to us, “a person who engages in an art, for example, as a pastime rather than as a profession,” a sense that had already developed in French. Given the limitations of doing something as an amateur, it is not surprising that the word is soon after recorded in the disparaging sense we still use to refer to someone who lacks professional skill or ease in performance.
# posted by Sweatpants Money : 9/13/2002 04:15:00 PM
