Friday, April 18, 2014

A-to-Z Challenge: Pain

And...pretend I put something clever here.



I figure by now, everyone’s hurting coming up with posts. So, pain.

Pain first showed up as a noun in the late thirteenth century, where it meant punishment, usually for a crime, as well as the definition we know it as. It comes from the Old French peine, suffering or punishment, and before that the classical Latin poena, penalty or punishment. Poena is also where subpoena comes from. I guess that makes it “under penalty”. Anyway, like many things, the Romans took that word from Greek, where the word poini means penalty. From there, it can be traced even further back to the Proto Indo European kwei, pay or atone. No, I don’t know why the k changed to a p. Peer pressure?

Sources
University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center

12 comments:

  1. It's interesting how it's related to subpoena.

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  2. Pain is in my 'P' post too. :)

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  3. Punishment was supposed to be painful I guess.

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  4. Interesting choice for the challenge. I had to scroll back and read some of the other day's words.

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  5. Came from punishment - that's interesting.

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  6. How do you go from Greek to Proto Indo European? That doesn't make any sense.

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  7. Hurting coming up with posts? Nope! Mine are done already. :)

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  8. Lol, yes, pain is totally appropriate for today!!

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  9. Pain: example- putting up with presence of irritating idiot ex-brother-in-law.

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  10. It is painful trying to come up with blog posts. I still have to get next week's written and scheduled. I do wonder how the k became p though.

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  11. Interesting about subpoeno! And, yes, coming up with posts is painful.

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  12. Pain came from punishment? Kind of makes sense.

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