Originally Posted By: twosleepy
 Originally Posted By: Faldage
Etymology is pure fact. We don't necessarily know what the facts are but wrong guesses are wrong guesses.

Hmmmm. Here I will have to disagree. There's not much pure anything in this world. How do you distinguish between a "pure" fact and a fact without an adjective? In the end, you are accepting another person's "facts" and really have no evidence of your own about the veracity, unless you actually witnessed it yourself. Does the acceptance by a majority make a "fact" true? How do you know what a "wrong guess" is if you don't know what the "pure fact" is? If people are guessing, there must not be a "pure fact" available, or they'd quit. Since we have scientists who change the "pure facts" about everything from what makes us fat to the origin of the universe on a regular basis, I'd say we're all guessing our way through our lives, and choose what we will believe as we go along, based in "pure fact" or not. :0)


When I said "[e]tymology is a pure fact" I was using "etymology" to mean the actual history of the development of a word. Some caveman eons ago cobbled together a bunch of phonemes to mean a cave bear. That set of phonemes became accepted by the whole bunch of cavemen and was used to mean what we know as 'cave bear.' If some of the people moved away from the area where the cave bears lived they still had the word and it may have been used to mean the area where the cave bears lived. Eventually it may have come to mean the area where any sort of bear lived, if there were no bears of any sort in the area where the speakers lived it may have come to mean the climate of that area. There are a lot of steps in this lineage that we can never reconstruct, but the lineage is still there. Of course we're never 100% certain. We make guesses based on what we know. If we're satisfied with those guesses we stop there and continue merrily on. This is what separates science from myth. In science we take those guesses and look for evidence that confirms or contradicts those guesses. In the case, e.g., of 'cracker' as a derogatory term for poor or racist whites some people have made the 'whipcracker' guess. If we find the term 'cracker' used for something very similar to the modern definition in a context that can easily be taken to have been connected to the modern usage and that pre-dates the circumstances that are involved in the 'whipcracker' guess than we can reasonably assume that the 'whipcracker' guess is wrong.