Was slightly mindblown whenl discovered this.

The two parts to the word “helicopter” are not “helil” and “copter”, but “helico” meaning spiral, and “pter” meaning one with wings, like pterodactyl.

1044 AM-5Mar 2018 21,200 Retweets 67,241 Lkes

wait WHAT

Aderinthemadscientist: Wait, so… does -copter come “from” helicopter?

108echoes: Yep! This is called rebracketing. Another famous example would be"-burger": the original food item is named after the German city, (Hamburgl+(er], but semantically reinterpreted as (ham]+[burger].

  • Cyrus DraegurEnglish
    24•1 year ago

    I was JUST thinking about this and had a nearly identical exchange with a friend of mine over a sci-fi series we’ve been reading.

    Humanity finally reverse engineered “kinetic fields” which allow the creation of force shields, synthetic gravity, stasis chambers, and the arbitrary conversation of energy into thrust WITHOUT a reaction mass, and we relatively promptly built VTOL vehicles that made traditional helicopters obsolete…

    … But in the canon of the setting, nobody was coming up with a better name for the new vehicles than “helicopter”, it was simply that no other names stuck.

    But I realized that since Kinetic Force Emitters work via electrostatic means, we would probably have to call them Electrostatopters and god DAMN that feels awful to say. So like … No wonder they kept calling them copters.

      • Cyrus DraegurEnglish
        11•1 year ago

        The Deathworlders,

        It’s a sprawling collaborative webseries that all but codified the “HFY” (Humanity, Fuck Yeah) / “Humans are Space Orcs” subgenre -
        -wherein our species discovers that, in the viewpoint of the rest of galactic society, WE are the terrifying scary space monsters.

        I love it to bits. You should at least read “The Kevin Jenkins Experience” which was its sort of “episode zero”/prototypical story. There are dozens of semi-canonical spin-off stories many others have based within this same “Jenkinsverse” setting.

        • @Sekoia@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          3•1 year ago

          Aw fuck I read that so much, and then it just kept spiralling into its muscle fetish. By far the most “the writer’s poorly disguised fetish” thing I’ve read. I don’t wanna read about steroids I wanna read about regular people doing stuff the aliens find impossible and inventing shit (||Von Neumann probes||)

          • Cyrus DraegurEnglish
            7•1 year ago

            You know, you’re definitely NOT wrong, I find my eyes glazing over as it hurtles headlong into beefcake gospel again and again; I’m enjoying ALL the other stuff but jesus fucking christ.

            Especially when it tries to make me give a shit about ONE specific character: Christian Firth AKA “Righteous”. He’s a CREEP. I DON’T CARE about his troubled childhood trauma or how much he struggles with his own brain’s constant hallucinations about how he might hypothetically messily splatter to pieces every other living creature within a thirty mile radius of his position at all times.

            And I thought the fucking relationship drama between Adam and Ava sucked, little did I know how much time would soon be squandered on softcore bodybuilding porn.

            This is the problem with web novels. Shit gets too far off the rails into an author’s unfiltered inner fixations. If he had an editor to crack him on the knuckles with a ruler every time he started waxing poetic about hairy sweaty glistening pecs and biceps (“less is more” and “kill your darlings”) it would be AT LEAST TWICE AS GOOD of a story.

            I mean, fuck, I get that it can feel good for the Spehs Mureenz to have actually earned their power and skill through some ‘show don’t tell’ exposition, but the key word here is SOME. I don’t need to know their goddamn meal plans and a play by play of one of their bizarre freakish aggressive violent ‘cuddling sessions’. I’d be having a much better time reading this if I weren’t GAGGING ON MUSCLE every other FUCKING paragraph.

            …

            anyway other than that I love the dialogue, i love the technological and cultural concepts it explores, i love the big reveals and discoveries made along the way, i love how delightfully campy that one alien is out of the pure joy and delight of defying his society’s repressive taboos over emotional expression, there’s so much to love that i’m still reading it despite the pack of bulky, hulking, throbbing, veiny, floor shaking, BO-stinking AGONY.

      • PyroEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        Statopter doesn’t sound too bad either. It also implies more heavily that static has something to do with the lift, rather than electricity alone.

        Edit: Wait, no, it’d be Statipter. I hate that. Yours was better.

    • @paholg@lemm.eeEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      We wouldn’t have to call them electrostaropters. In fact, my money is on such a thing in the real world being named completely differently. Maybe “drones” despite having pilots.

  • @Treczoks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16•1 year ago

    Hamburgl+(er]

    No, that was soemone else. The city is still called Hamburg, and the inhabitants Hamburger.

  • iZomEnglish
    10•1 year ago

    Does that mean the ‘P’ was supposed to be silent? You don’t say puh-terodactyl without getting laughed at in school… Um, probably!! So, is it a actually called a helicoter?

    • @hakase@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      27•1 year ago

      The ‘p’ is only silent in English because English doesn’t allow syllables to start with ‘pt’. It was perfectly fine to do so in ancient Greek, where both the ‘p’ and the ‘t’ would be pronounced, but when English borrowed the ‘pt’-initial words, the ‘p’ gets deleted to make the word pronounceable.

      But, it’s perfectly fine in English for one syllable to end with ‘p’ and the next to start with ‘t’, so English speakers have no problem saying ‘cop-ter’.

      Same with, for example, ‘tsunami’ vs. ‘Mit-subishi’ (which in Japanese is actually syllabified ‘mi-tsu-bi-shi’).

      • synae[he/him]English
        7•1 year ago

        Excuse me, I believe you’ve misspelled hella cooter

    • @turmacar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11•1 year ago

      Technically they’re not just fictional. People build little RC ones, they would just be incredibly complicated compared to even a helicopter to scale up and make controllable/powerful enough to carry people.

      One of the cooler flying mechanisms that seem to be a dead end.

  • Echo DotEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    Perhaps I’m going to show myself up as a linguistic brat but doesn’t everyone know that helio means wing or flight?

    It’s where words like halo come from. The aurora around a winged angel.

    Or heliopause, Helio in this case meaning high up. Literally, high up air.

    • EnkrodEnglish
      11•1 year ago

      No, Bürger means Citizen, Burger doesn’t really exist as a german word, but would mean “someone from a castle” or “someone doing something with castles”.

      Those Umlaut-Dots change the pronounciation and the meaning, they are important!