How Learning Word Origins is Helpful: Linguistics and the Origins of Words

Learning how to unravel the spider web of words and their origin often proves beneficial to serious freelance writers. Words are at the heart of every freelance writer’s and content producer’s articles. Many of them have a powerful impact on a reader’s consciousness and sub-consciousness. Writers do not always realize the significance or the implications of the words they write; nor do many others. 

Learning word origins prove to be helpful in this regard.

Finding the meaning of word origins entails attempting to unravel words within their current contexts and finding their roots. Where did the words originate? Were they originally French, Greek or Latin? Perhaps they have an Old English, Oriental or East Indian root.  

A spider web portrays an example of what happens with words, as they evolve over generations.

Remember that anything that evolves can devolve also. For example, to unravel a spider web, it would be necessary to begin at the outside and work towards the inside of it, thus returning to or finding its origin. 

Where did the spider start to weave its intricate web?

The meanings of words compiled in dictionaries can assist an avid freelance writer to find the correct interpretation of different or unusual words. With respect to the origins of words, revealing their usage within historically specific contexts, dictionaries prove helpful too.

Finding out the origins of words involves linguistics.

Freedictionary.com suggests that linguistics is “the study of the nature, structure, and variation of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics.”

   

Words change dramatically over generations, as do their meanings and significance. At times, the transitions may be subtle, but they are often traceable to their origins. Words have unique usages in different centuries. The context of words in one era can vary considerably from that in another.

The important thing for freelance writers is that the words they use are correct within their time frame and context. For example, writing fiction intended to depict the seventeenth century may have words with contextual meaning differing from those used in contemporary writing.

Learning word origins makes writing a joy for the freelance writer, rather than a formidable task.

Learning new words daily is an excellent practice, as long as the freelance writer takes into consideration the origin of the words, not just their dictionary meaning.

Linguistics is a serious study in college and university and studying linguistics works to the advantage of serious freelance writers pursuing various academic pathways. Linguistics is not restricted to academics. It is also helpful in terms of understanding different languages. How words are used can vary from one language to another, as well as one translation to another.

Learning word origins proves interesting, exciting and challenging for freelance writers and enhances their writing skills.

Dictionary.com gives an excellent example of word origins in “ubiquitous”, “having or seeming to have the ability to be everywhere at once; omnipresent,” dating back to the 1580’s and Modern Latin.

Words are like that, pervasive like the air we breathe, also subject to more than one meaning because of their origins.