The hell?

[siercia]

I just heard one of my (normally intelligent) co-workers come out with the following, while discussing North and South American indigenous people (other co-worker speaks English as a second language, so she stumbled over the word indigenous:

"we generally call them "indigenous... That's where the common name of Indian comes from, it's an abbreviation of the word indigenous."

Well, that's the first time I've ever heard that theory. I'd love fomr someone to prove him right though =)

Comments

[siercia]

Yeah, me too!

[quezz.livejournal.com]

History teacher say "Ouch." Please tell me you corrected said co-worker.

[siercia]

I didn't, because I was in the other room, and zooming in to correct his mistake seemed like it would be really obnoxious.

But damn...

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

Not even close.

"Indian" is of course from "India":
Origin: < L < Gk Indía, equiv. to Ind(ós) the Indus river (< OPers Hindu lit., the river; c. Skt sindhu) + -ia -ia

"indigenous":
Origin: 1640–50; < L indigen(a) native, original inhabitant (indi-, by-form of in- in-2 (cf. indagate) + -gena, deriv. from base of gignere to bring into being; cf. genital, genitor) + -ous

A good general rule is, if anyone says anything about the derivation of an English word, and they're not a linguist and they haven't looked it up, they're almost certainly wrong. :)

[siercia]

Yeah, that probably is a good rule.

[old-blevins.livejournal.com]

And here I thought it was because they were indignant at the way we treated them.
I wonder how many homes and offices even have dictionaries anymore.

[siercia]

Hee.

I have a dictionary! And Merriam-Webster set up in my Google toolbar =)

[nemomori.livejournal.com]

Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow. Make the stupid man stop hurting my brain.

[siercia]

The odd thing is that he's not actually stupid. He just let this one supremely stupid thing fly out of his mouth.

[cfred.livejournal.com]

I daresay that's a load of gu-a-sa-ta.

(Yeah, I know, "trash floating on water". I couldn't get anything even as close as "fertilizer" from the online Cherokee dictionary I found, much less "bullshit".)

[siercia]

Hee