You can create a Venn diagram of “people who use words .” wandering And crop” and “those who are worried about whether they are using wandering And crop exactly” it would be an almost perfect circle. There is a good reason for the confusion: for a considerable time, both meant the same thing. Both words have been in use since centuries. 14, and cropat least in its early days, simply a change of wandering.
‘Errant’ originally meant “traveling”—a “wandering knight” was a knight who traveled in search of adventure.
The word has a distinct history: it comes from Anglo-French, a language in which two confusingly similar verbs with identical spellings (“errer”) co-exist. One mistake means “mistake” and comes from Latin mistake, which means “to wander” or “to err.” Second letter mistake means “to travel” and comes from Latin repeat, which means “path” or “journey.” Both homographs contributed to the development of wanderingthis is not surprising in regards to both moving and being confused.
The earliest meaning of both wandering And crop is “to travel or be allowed to travel.” Etymologists believe that crop took its present meaning, “absolutely bad”, from the frequency with which this feeling of “traveling” crop modified words like thief (as in “the wanderer or the wandering thief”). Wanderingmeanwhile, carries the additional meanings of “might go wrong”, “misbehave” and “get lost”.
The first writer to notice that these two words were being confused – and that something had to be done about it – was Robert Baker, who in 1770 Reflection on the English language wrote “These two words are sometimes confused by Writers,” and went on to try to explain how to distinguish between them. Robert Baker is one of our strangest and most shoddy grammarians, an ardent defender of the English language, unfettered by education. In his foreword reflect, Baker wrote “I now confess that I know absolutely nothing of Greek, but indifferently fluent in Latin, where I can understand nothing but what is easy,” and also informed to my readers that “I dropped out of school at fifteen.” In addition, he explained that, because he was quite poor, “I don’t have a Book myself.”
Perhaps understandably, some authors using the next 150 or so years have paid much attention to Baker’s call to distinguish between wandering And crop. The words seem to have evolved spontaneously. Currently crop is only used to mean “of the worst kind”, while wandering can mean “travelling”, “lost”, “moving aimlessly”, or “misbehaving”.
If that doesn’t help, here’s a bullet point:
If you are confused by crop And wandering,
And wish so much that you hadn’t,
While both used to mean “to travel”,
Through semantic clarification,
This meaning for crop currently no more.
Categories: Usage Notes
Source: vothisaucamau.edu.vn
