[Gllug] Fw: goldfish

[Nix]

On Mon, 23 Sep 2002, formi at blueyonder.co.uk mused:
>  Well, a bit of research left me a bit puzzled:
> 
> cor cordis n. [the heart]; often as seat of emotions or thought , [heart, 
> mind, judgment]; meton., [a person]. 
> 
> cardiacus -a -um [pertaining to the stomach]; m. as subst. , [one who 
> suffers from a disease of the stomach].

Uh, what?!

I don't know enough Latin to know where *that* came from but I guess it
got left behind by English medicspeak :)

>  What I don't understand is the change in the root, cord - card.
>  Normally it stays intact.

Lots of nasty things can happen when people steal words from other
languages (which is basically what happened here). The root can be
changed intentionally to make it sound better, or can shift sound (and
spelling) by any of several mechanisms.

I don't know enough about the etymology of the word to know what
happened here, and neither of the etymologies on my shelf list the word
(presumably because its origin is supposed to be bloody obvious ;) )

-- 
`Let's have a round of applause for those daring young men
 and their flying spellcheckers.' --- Meg Worley

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