Why does thrift mean the practice of managing your money wisely, but a spendthrift is someone who throws money around recklessly? Until recently I thought that spendthrift meant the opposite of what it actually does.
Stupid English language.
The Tin Man
Your “thrift” is that upon which you “thrive,” and if you “spend” your “thrift” recklessly instead of managing your budget and saving, you become a “spendthrift.”
I happen to like these old Anglo-Saxon words. I think it would be fun take common words from Greek and Latin and other foreign sources and replace them them with new words built from A-S roots. Of course, it would make English look a lot like German, but that would add to the excitement.
BTW, can you tell I have nothing to do here today? ;)
English “spendthrift” is a compound made from the verb “spend” + noun “thrift”, the latter indeed etymologically meaning ‘prosperity’. Romance languages can do the same thing, e.g. Spanish “tocadiscos” ‘record player’, French “porte-parole” ‘spokesperson’, where verbal root + noun = noun-verb’er. The meaning of “thrift” shifted to ‘frugality’ from Middle to Modern English, obscuring the meaning of the compound. Add to this the fact that we can’t form verb + noun compounds to get noun-verb’ers anymore. P.S. How goes Latin?
Ah, gotcha. Well that explains it!
I haven’t picked up the Latin book in a couple of months… I guess I had my fill. Maybe I’ll pick it up again at some point.
One of these days we might be able to find a time when we’re both free and can meet for drinks or something and I can get back the Wheelock book I leant you. It seems that every holiday or other long weekend, something has always come up.
BTW: the lines I have written above, and this as well, are all fully of English stock. It’s hard to write or speak well without words borrowed from other tongues.
Oh. You were writing to someone else. My bad.
Yay, I love etymology.
This is what you get when you cobble a language together with some Gaelic, Anglo-Saxon (German), French, Latin, a bit of Greek, and I’m sure a few others!