#linguists, riddle me this. Splice two words together. Terrible and horrific. You get, terrific? Which is a completely opposite vibe! Now clearly ific is some kind of suffix and probably doesn't carry it's own meaning that much, so let's ignore horrific for a second, but then how is that that the terr root of terrible, which is also used in terrify, became that meaning in terrific? Terrify and terrific are seemingly ridiculously close in the semantic tree, ify and ific I think being effectively variant forms for different parts of speech, and yet the actual meaning is completely opposite! Contrast with horrific and horrify, which are clearly related, one being an adjective and one being a verb, both meaning the same basic concept. Something horrific horrified you. But something terrific doesn't terrify you.... How does that make sense⁉️ How did that happen? Did the meaning used to be different? Was there some kind of morphing of the spoken or written form over time that ended up fudging one of those into that position? Am I incorrect about my preliminary analysis of the morphemes and their semantics? #linguistics #english
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
Erion
in reply to x0 • • •Terrific (from terribilis), causing terror, essentially terrible. It meant this around the late 1800s and before.
Terrify, to cause (to make) terror, comes from terrificāre, it's Vulgar Latin.
While terrify's meaning remained the same, terrific had undergone a semantic shift, from negative to positive, however, there was an in-between state, where it was used ironically, or to add some flourish, extraordinaire, think of how we say something is a killer today.
This just reflects how cultural needs can change any language in even the weirdest directions.