The word “decide” has deadly origins
etymologynerd.com
etymologynerd.com
"Choisir, c'est renoncer" (to choose is to give up).
That said, the title posted here is disingenuous: "decide" is not at all related to death, it's related to "cut" or "remove", it just so happens that that root is coincidentally used with prefixes leading to "remove life". So at best it has deadly siblings, not origins.
In fact, I cannot see that title on the linked page, it seems to have been substituted from "Choices"?
This really resonates with me strongly.
Choice is usually portrayed as empowerment or a something you can do from position of empowerment. But choosing is resigning to your fate and loosing everything you have not chosen. The truly empowered are the ones that don't need to choose much.
And choice is not something you need to be empowered to do. There are really very few and very rare occasions where you truly have just one option. Usually when you think you have no choice, you really do, but you choose the current option that is not what you want because you still prefer it to all other you can imagine.
Awareness of that fact helped me in toughest times.
You can't really eat cake without first having a cake to eat. If you eat it, you don't have cake any more; if you don't, you still have cake.
Therefore, if you want to eat your cake and have it, you want to do something but don't want the consequence of it.
I'm partial to "eat your cake and keep it too", FWIW; "have" is ambigous.
It’s about trying to exchange butter for money but thinking you could somehow end up with both, either intentionally by rigging a zero sum game to someone’s detriment, or mistakenly through a leap of flawed logic when one does not realise it’s zero sum, and thinks it can be outgamed with enough swapping around.
It teaches you not to focus on regret and only care about risk/satisfaction ratio, and to keep moving.
This topic also tailor your sense of self too. When you made a few too many bad choices (job, relationship, location) you get a finer sense of what you want.
I read this and thought maybe we as a culture are too hung up on empowerment, power, power-seeking, etc. You say true power is not needing to choose, I say why is it important to seek power at all?
Every decision for something is a decision against something. (Netflix Dark)
But yeah, not a great title
de-cision: cut off (eliminate the alternatives)
sui-cide, homi-cide, regi-cide, etc: cut/stab/slay self, a man, a king, etc.
My barber won't listen to me, but he foolishly keeps a bottle of barbicide around.
The two, though contemporaries, could not be more different in my mind, and that is represented in the clarity of the short statement vs short poem. Yet the underlying loss expressed’ is the same.
(I don't intend to get into lit crit: the last line of the poem heads in an additional direction, but that's the difference between three words and a few hundred)
(srsly, good reading, thx!)
Steve Martin followed a similar path, philosophy major to comedy with a flair for the absurdity of life -- followed to the (il-)logical conclusion...
In practice, however, gaining knowledge often increases our awareness of how things might be even faster than it removes possibilities that we formerly considered: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio..."
I think I would classify that act as making a different choice, but not everybody sees it that way.
What works better is to identify reversible decisions and just make them, clearing the deck for those that do have serious opportunity costs associated with them.
It's a fascinating channel and very unique style of videos. Here's one of my favourites, on colors:
It's definitely a unique style; I think if you don't like it within the first 5-10 mins you won't like the channel at all.
As a fan of etymology, I'd have to agree. It went so quickly between facts that I didn't recall the previous facts and barely had time to pay attention to the current facts, before it moved on. I'm also not a fan of the layout. One much shorter video focusing on one color would've been a lot better for me, then rinse and repeat. As for the layout, I would have it show the presenter talking while in the top corner the images are shown. Something less visually distracting.
My feeling is that etymology-focused content is hard to produce. I've seen several channels or podcasts and they all fall short in a few areas.
Though it is now used to mean "to destroy a large number of", it used to have a very specific meaning:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downsampling_(signal_processin...
I was wondering about Dutch, where the verb is "beslissen". But from what I gather from a (superficial) search, that comes from "beslitsen", which again comes from "splitsen" (breaking apart).
Wondering now if the French expression for "making a difficult choice" has anything to do with it ("faire la part des choses" -> "breaking things up")
I like "to resolve a conflict" more than "to kill" :-) Fits well in the poldermodel too!
Slissen is no longer used in modern Dutch for this, but used for "lisp" instead, but that didn't arrive until the early 20th century and seems to have an unrelated etymology which I can't seem to find right now; it could just be phonetic, or perhaps it's related in some strange way after all.
This was over 15 years ago; I'm sure it's better now.
Git doesn't have a Dutch translation, but it does have a German and "root" is translated as "Wurzelverzeichnis ("Wurzel" being root, and "verzeichnis" being directory). It does translate "root commit" as just "root commit" though. "Root nodes" are "Hauptwurzeln".
Technically it's correct, but as a Dutch/German speaker I'd find translating root in such a way surprising and confusing, even though it's a correct translation. Perhaps that's also because I'm so used to the English, but even as a Dutch or German user you'll likely find English documentation/help regardless, and having the same technical terms is useful there. Consistency is important, but generally speaking translating technical English terms too enthusiastically is probably more confusing than helpful.
Actually, I just remembered that "show threads" was translated as "draden tonen" (I can't find the current translation of this in GNOME, procps-ng leaves it as "threads" in the German translation).
I also noticed that "parent/child relationships between processes" in GNOME is translated as "Moeder/dochter-relatie tussen processen", which seems rather awkward to me, but leaving it as just "parent" and "child" doesn't seem great either.
Translating stuff is hard, and it gets harder the more technical it gets :-/ Something like an email client probably isn't too hard, but technical tools like process monitors? I don't envy the people working on that.
Or "besluiten", from "sluiten", to close/terminate.
Do you have this source? all I can found is that it's from Middle Dutch “slissen” which meant “to end” but it isn't terribly well sourced.
OTOH, that verb usually corresponds to Dutch "sluiten". "(be)slissen" seems to mean the same as "(be)sluiten", but with a different etymology. I'm not sure whether it fits chronologically, but perhaps it is a loan from German or a development, atypical for Dutch, but similar to that in German?
They sort of confirmed the conclusion I always arrive at : etymology is 50% guesswork
There's also the saying: "De knoop doorhakken" (to cut the rope), which basically means to decide.
Some people are very good at selecting among options, others are good at acting under uncertainty. It's important to recognize what kind of information problem you are solving, and whether you need to employ a choice or a decision strategy.
There are a bunch of these english synonyms that confuse and conflate some very important differences, and I think this is one of them.
Not sure many people make decisions that definitively anymore!
Priority is another one that used to be about only having on thing that is the priority, but later got diluted with words like prioritise where it’s just about having an order of importance, not one specific all encompassing purpose.
Some people take it quite alliterally.
> People who confuse etymology and entomology bug me in a way I can't put into words.
That made me smile. Thanks.
This seems a lot more apt given this etymology, even if it doesn't work for the German equivalent.
― Aristotle
― Aristotle
The Romans used a lot of euphemisms for death ("gave up his breath" is a common one, which gives rise to "expire").
Decision - to cut away
Making a decision is to cut away all other choices, leaving only one. It's why making a decision is so powerful: other choices are off the table and we're free to pursue a single option.
I see a lot of people my age afraid of decisions. It is exactly because it cuts off what they think future possibilities are.
The issue is that it is paralyzing for them, they can’t make any important decisions.
We have access to everything all the time. Its probably linked to the addiction disorders online.
It's not hard to guess how people knew how to decide better when things had more weight or were more critical. Cold, food, drought, disease, energy.. when everything is tight your brain is sharper too.
I still hold the contrast made the decision clearer, if you don't have the vision or grit to go against your local environment then it's simply better for you to follow it, at least it works.
I wrote a series of posts on using this awareness to make choosing and deciding easier, with graphs: https://joshuaspodek.com/choose-easier-visualizing-choices and https://joshuaspodek.com/choose-easier-visualizing-choices-2.
Suicide, homicide, genocide. Whenever I feel conflicted about a decision I feel like I’m killing an option. It’s a dramatic framework, and probably why I’m not decisive.
2. Analysis paralysis is no joke either.
deicide: The killing of a god
Also in italian (and possibly other romance languages) the meaning is "short, to the point", the etymology evokes the "cutting" ("cesoie", scissors), but nothing evoking the "two birds" metaphor.
I did look it up, and the latin dictionaries give "fallen together" or "fallen into pieces", and it also seems to be used for slaughter. "With cuts" or "cut up".
Interestingly some etymologies give the original verb as concido (from cado, "fall", not "cut"). So the etymology of concisus (concise) could also be an expression of "squishing together".
An anecdote: in Italy you can often see the "scissors" hand gestures when the interlocutor wants you to get to the point. I don't know how ancient people came up with the word, but the killing metaphor seems a bit of a stretch; perhaps cutting one's tongue would be enough!