Was slightly mindblown whenl discovered this.

The two parts to the word “helicopter” are not “helil” and “copter”, but “helico” meaning spiral, and “pter” meaning one with wings, like pterodactyl.

1044 AM-5Mar 2018 21,200 Retweets 67,241 Lkes

wait WHAT

Aderinthemadscientist: Wait, so… does -copter come “from” helicopter?

108echoes: Yep! This is called rebracketing. Another famous example would be"-burger": the original food item is named after the German city, (Hamburgl+(er], but semantically reinterpreted as (ham]+[burger].

  • iZom@feddit.ukEnglish
    0·
    11 months ago

    Does that mean the ‘P’ was supposed to be silent? You don’t say puh-terodactyl without getting laughed at in school… Um, probably!! So, is it a actually called a helicoter?

  • Cyrus Draegur@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    11 months ago

    I was JUST thinking about this and had a nearly identical exchange with a friend of mine over a sci-fi series we’ve been reading.

    Humanity finally reverse engineered “kinetic fields” which allow the creation of force shields, synthetic gravity, stasis chambers, and the arbitrary conversation of energy into thrust WITHOUT a reaction mass, and we relatively promptly built VTOL vehicles that made traditional helicopters obsolete…

    … But in the canon of the setting, nobody was coming up with a better name for the new vehicles than “helicopter”, it was simply that no other names stuck.

    But I realized that since Kinetic Force Emitters work via electrostatic means, we would probably have to call them Electrostatopters and god DAMN that feels awful to say. So like … No wonder they kept calling them copters.

      • Pyro@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        Statopter doesn’t sound too bad either. It also implies more heavily that static has something to do with the lift, rather than electricity alone.

        Edit: Wait, no, it’d be Statipter. I hate that. Yours was better.

    • paholg@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      We wouldn’t have to call them electrostaropters. In fact, my money is on such a thing in the real world being named completely differently. Maybe “drones” despite having pilots.