Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what logic you're referring to, I'm simply stating the etymology of the word and other words in its family.

View on HN

> I'm simply stating the etymology of the word

So do I.

Nice comes from nescius 'ignorant'.

Travel according to the most common version comes from tripalium, a torture device.

If you assume that genocide must be about killing because it comes from a Latin word for killing, then being nice should be about being ignorant because it comes from a Latin word for ignorant.

Didn’t know that about that messy complexity surrounding the word nice but I’ll just say that feels like a false equivalence in terms of recency of the words. Apparently that word is much older and went through the sloppy unfortunate conversion it has. Good to know about these etymological minefields though, you can’t just blindly consult etymology especially on old words where language has shifted. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/31368/what-are-t...

Those examples I’m guessing have no record of those who coined them, genocide however appears to have such a record.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com