Online job applications were a widespread crypto-eugenics program that took hold during the late 20th and early 21st century. These applications were notable for heavy use of videoconference interviews, little to no emphasis on exams and assessments (with rare exceptions, usually implemented to obtain unpaid labor from applicants), and a general disregard for time, scheduling, results, or basic human dignity.

Despite widespread contemporary criticism, the online job application was only abolished after the Job Board Riots in the latter half of the century.

Linkedin used to have these little micro-exams you could do to prove that you really do Know A Skill. apparently they removed them this year because hiring managers wanted the candidate to Describe In Their Own Words how they've ~used~ a given skill, thus reinforcing the "need experience to get experience" problem. all hiring managers die a thousand firey deaths.

It has occurred to me that most people who don't know much about European history (particularly of the Reformation) might not know what "crypto-" means as a prefix in cases like this, and because of how much we talk about cryptography and cryptocurrency, it's probably really hard to look up if you don't already know what it means.

"Crypto" comes from a Greek word, κρύπτω, which means "to hide, conceal, to be hid." Cryptography, therefore, is writing where the meaning is hidden (because it's in code). But "cryptography" to mean "code" only came about in the 19th Century. OP is using an older formation, which has nothing to do with codes or enciphering or securing communications. It's just using "crypto-" to literally mean "hidden/concealed."

When you call someone a crypto-[whatever], you're saying that even though they don't call themselves a [whatever], they actually are, they're just hiding it. So, for example, Lutherans in 16th Century Germany called Lutherans they disagreed with "crypto-Calvinists" to discredit them--they weren't really Lutherans, they actually followed Calvinist teachings. Sometimes calling someone a "crypto-[whatever]" is an accurate statement; for example, Crypto-Jews are Jews who live in places where being Jewish is illegal, so they claim to be some other religion to avoid persecution.

So a crypto-eugenicist is someone who doesn't claim to be a eugenicist (and may even say they don't like eugenics), but when you look at what they say and do you find they're actually enacting eugenicist policies.

Pablo Hidalgo was having a semi-breakdown on his twt yesterday because of people using words based on things that only exist in our world (milestone, dumpster, etc) and tbh this was so real of him he might be one of my favorite Star Wars creators

@tremendouskoalachild here!

and a link https://x.com/pabl0hidalgo/status/1732151343366975889?s=20

Three Things: 1. I wrote "a dime a dozen" into a book specifically to mess with Pablo, 2. This man told me with COMPLETE SERIOUSNESS that people in Star Wars do not send texts or emails, and 3. I had to take the word "canape" out of Crimson Climb, and I forget what we ended up using, because one of the direct translation options was "Force meat" and every time I think about it, I pass out a little bit. I do love the vibes, though.

sabotage is one of my favorite words because it comes from pissed off workers throwing their sabots into the gears of machines to break them and secure better working conditions. how fucking badass do you have to be to have your protest against the deadly machines of industry coin an entirely new term that means ‘destroy it with your shoes’.

Opposite of Bootlicker

I fucking hate languages.

The Greeks had this word, right, we have no idea where it came from, it just kinda popped up out of nowhere, and it could mean either apples, cheeks, or boobs. Problem is it looked and sounded *exactly* like another, unrelated word which could mean sheep, goat, or any animal in general really, which must have got confusing if you were a farmer talking about your livestock, but anyway…

Then the Romans, having stolen practically everything else from the Greeks, thought they’d nick this word too, because Latin isn’t confusing enough without throwing in a bunch of loan words. And they adopted it to mean a pumpkin.

Then the English came along and were all like “when in Rome”, and stole it, where it became our word ‘melon’. Which has now come back to mean boobs.

How do you like them apples.

I fucking love languages.

In case anyone doubts the veracity of this:

[ source ]

Calling boobs ‘melons’ literally transcends culture, time, and language.

official boob post

Sometimes I get annoyed because the name Sullivan literally means ‘one eye. ’ It’s from Irish, ‘súil amháin.’ Literally. One eye.

So when they were making Monster’s Inc, somoene looked at this

  and guess which one they decided to call Sullivan????????

ฬĦĪĊĦ??????

I did not need this in my life and I will never forgive you.

If it’s any consolation, Sully’s first name is James. A quick web search and I found this:

While not a perfect fit, I now like to think that Sully’s name is “One Who Follows One-Eye” or…

“Mike’s Sidekick”

And that’s hilarious to me.

One of my favorite linguistic phenomena is rebracketing, which is when a word or words is/are redivided differently, either two words becoming one, one word heard as two, or part of one word interpreted as part of the other.  This frequently happens with articles, for example:

Related to this, sometimes two words, especially when borrowed into another language, will be taken as one.  Numerous words were borrowed from Arabic with the definite article al- attached to them.  Spanish el lagarto became English alligator.  An interesting twist is admiral, earlier amiral (the d probably got in there from the influence of words like “administer”) from Arabic amir al- (lord of the ___), particularly the phrase amir al-bahr, literally “lord of the sea”.

Sometimes the opposite happens.  A foreign word will look like two words, or like a word with an affix.  For example, the Arabic kitaab (book) was borrowed into Swahili as kitabu.  ki- happens to be the singular form of one of the Swahili genders, and so it was interpreted as ki-tabu.  To form the plural of that gender, you replace ki- with vi-, thus, “books” in Swahili is vitabu.  The Greek name Alexander became, in Arabic, Iskander, with the initial al- heard as the article al-.

Similarly, the English word Cherry came from Old Norman French cherise, with the s on the end interpreted as the plural -s.  Interestingly enough, that word came from Vulgar Latin ceresia, a feminine singular noun, but originally the plural of the neuter noun ceresium!  So a Latin plural was reinterpreted as a singular in Vulgar Latin, which in turn was interpreted as a plural when borrowed into English!

The English suffix -burger used with various foods (e.g., cheeseburger, or more informally chickenburger, etc.) was misanlyzed from Hamburger as Ham-burger, itself from the city of Hamburg

This can happen even with native words.  Modern French once is used for the snow leopard, but originally meant “lynx”.  In Old French, it was lonce (ultimately from the same source as lynx), which was reinterpreted as l’once!  In English, the word “pea” was originally “pease”, but that looked like it had the plural -s on it, and so the word “pea” was created from it.  Likewise, the adjective lone came from alone, heard as “a lone”, but alone itself came originally from all one.

One of my favorite personal examples is the old Southern man who would come into work and ask me if I was “being have” (as opposed to the more usual “behaving”).

the word editor predated the word edit - editor was reinterpreted as edit-er, so clearly someone who edits!

when your open borders advocacy extends to morpheme boundaries

Don’t forget the Swahili kipilefti (”roundabout”), from English keep left, with a plural vipilefti - and in reverse, singular kideo (”video”) with plural video.

Note that the “editor” > “edit-er” > “to edit” transformation is a related but distinct phenomenon called back-formation. That’s where you take a noun that sounds like it ought to be derived from a verb (though it really isn’t), and work backwards to obtain the “original” verb. Hence, we have it that editors edit, burglars burgle, and butlers buttle - though we haven’t yet gone so far as to suggest that fingers fing!

This is similar to how we have the suffix -copter formed from helicopter, even though its component parts are helico- (spiral) and -pter (wing).

I’ve seen people refer to something cobbled together from different parts of the same kind of object as [thing]-stein, in a reference to Frankenstein’s creation, who has been misidentified as Frankenstein. But it really just means “stone” in german, indicating you’re a stonemason or you come from a partially stone related place.

“Franken-” is also used in a similar way. Like, I made a sandwich from the leftovers of 2 or 3 other sandwiches, that might be a Frankensandwich.

@missworthing my grandfather used to do this! And I picked it up from him, in turn. We’re from NW Pennsylvania.

One of the ballsiest things Tolkien ever did was write 473k words about some hobbits called frodo, sam, merry, and pippin and then write in the appendices that their names are actually maura, ban, kali, and razal. 

This just in: Eowyn and Eomer’s names actually start with the letter “L.” [source for other nerds] 

#wait so they have hobbitish names and common names?

No, they have Westron names and English names.

What you’ve got to understand is that everything Tolkien wrote was him pretending to merely translate ancient documents. He was writing as if the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were actually been written by Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam (or Bilba, Maura, and Ban) and he was just some random contemporary academic translating it all into English for us. 

There are many languages in his books, but generally speaking, everything written in English in the books is a translation of the language “Westron.” Therefore any names that come from Westron, he translated. Names coming from other languages, like Sindarin, he left as they were. Why? IDK. Maybe because the stories are from a hobbit perspective and hobbits speak Westron, so he wanted the Westron parts to sound familiar and the other languages/names to remain foreign? 

“But Mirkwoodest!” you cry, “The word ‘hobbit’ isn’t an English word! And the names Bilbo Baggins, Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Peregrin Took, and Meriadoc Brandybuck” all sounds super weird and not like English at all!”

Psych! They are in English! (Or Old English, German, or Norse.) Once again you underestimate what a nerd Tolkien was. Let me break it down: 

In Westron, hobbits are actually called “kuduk,” which means “hole-dweller,” so for an English translation, Tolkien called them “hobbits” which is a modernization of the Old English word “holbytla” which comes from “Hol” (hole) and “Bytla”(builder). 

“Maura” is a Westron name which means “Wise.” Weirdly enough, “Frodo” is an actual Proto-Germanic name that actual people used to have and it means the same thing. 

“Banazîr” is Westron for “half-wise, or simple.” In Proto Germanic, the prefix “Sam” means half, and wise is obviously a word we still use. 

“Razanur” means “Traveler” or “Stranger” which is also the meaning of the word “Peregrin(e)” This one is a twofer because  “Razar” means “a small red apple” and in English so does “Pippin.”

“Kalimac” apparently is a meaningless name in Westron, but the shortened form “Kali” means “happy,” so Jirt decided his nickname would be “Merry” and chose the really obscure ancient Celtic name “Meriodoc” to match. 

Jirt chose to leave “Bilba” almost exactly the same in English, but he changed the ending to an “O” because in Westron names ending in “a” are masculine. 

I’m not going to go on and talk about the last names but those all have special meanings too (except Tûk, which is too iconic to change more than the spelling of, apparently). 

The Rohirrim were also Westron speakers first and foremost, so their names are also “translations” into Old English and Proto-Germanic words, i.e. “Eowyn”  is a combination of “Eoh” (horse) and “Wynn” (joy/bliss). 

“Rohirrim/Rohan” are Sindarin words, but in the books, they call themselves the “Éothéod” which is an Old English/Norse combo that means “horse people.” Tolkien tells us in the “Peoples of Middle Earth” that the actual Westron for “Éothéod” is Lohtûr, which means that Eowyn and Eomer’s names, which come from the same root word, must also start with the letter L. 

The names of all the elves, dwarves, Dunedain, and men from Gondor are not English translations, since they come from root words other than Westron. 

The takeaway from this is that when a guy whose first real job was researching the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter “W” writes a book, you can expect this kind of tomfoolery.

Notes: Sorry I said “Razal” instead of “Razar” in my original post I’m a fraud. 

Further Reading: 

Rohirric , Westron 

Is there any word that’s had a wilder evolutionary path than “gothic”?

Seriously, it went from meaning this:

to this:

to this:

and finally ended up as this:

You go you funky word, keep on trucking.

There’s a good reason for that!!!  Here’s an explanation literally no one asked for, and OP probably already knows, but I like talking about all my hyperfixations, and this covers like four of them. (Now, I’m going off the top of my head and its been a few years since I took an art history class) but the jist of it is that the “new” cathedral style that ended up being called Gothic, was called so, because the flying buttresses and pointed arches, and other pointy, overdramatic details were considered kind of barbaric compared to the older style. I want to say this was the point where cathedrals went from being ‘ornate’ to ‘dear god what the fuck are you even doing?!”  So basically we have gothic as this word that means, big and old and overdramatic and vaguely threatening. Which goes perfectly with the mood needing to be set by authors who place characters dealing with a crisis of faith, or a crisis of morality, in this big old mouldering expansive tomb of a house that represents everything of the distant past and the dark secrets rotting the foundations of polite society. But…the Victorians worshipped the austere version of the greeks and neoclassical, and all that neat white marble. But also an austerity as far as people went, there was this Christian ideal to aspire to. So the decrepit tomb aesthetic, the doom and gloom and the decaying manor house, The Fall of Usher thing, it was popular for the same reason anything creepy is popular now. That love for the morbid and forbidden has never not existed. I mean…Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a best seller when it come out because it had all of the above and THEN some. So far we’ve got Gothic as old and decaying and overdramatic and threatening but also kind of sexy (see gothic romances, or the use of gothic romance/gothic horror to explore Victorian fears and anxieties about sex and death and immorality).  Fast forward to the late 1970s when Siouxsie and the Banshees distilled that into a look and a performance. They were a punk band, but Siouxsie dressed like a vamp, she had the Theda Bara makeup and wore Victorian lingerie on the outside, but also fishnets and pointy boots. She was the femme fatale. She had the sex and death of both Vampira and Theda Bara, but her and the band had the theatrics of Screamin Jay Hawkins. A journalist described their music as gothic, as an insult, and exploded outward from there. But…they weren’t the sole band to be described this way, or necessarily the first to sound like that or dress like that. But they had enough of all these things to have that word linked to them. And their fans, and The Cure’s fans, and Sister’s of Mercy’s fans, and Bauhaus’ fans, created the subculture and look that we call Goth now. And much of the look has fanned out and expanded from years and years of the world’s most dramatic people trying to outdo each other at the club. That’s how we got from A to B. Thanks for coming to my TED talk. 

So what you’re telling me is that “gothic” really just means “extra.”

@deadcatwithaflamethrower have you seen this?

I fucking love the idea of interpeting Gothic as EXTRA. YES this.

Of COURSE “gothic” means “extra”. Have you SEEN us?!

Bugs Bunny accidentally transformed the word nimrod into a synonym for idiot because nobody got a joke where he sarcastically compared Elmer Fudd to the Biblical figure Nimrod, a mighty hunter.

Etymology is ridiculous and terrifying sometimes

Bugs Bunny is more powerful than God

He also solidified the idea of rabbits loving carrots when carrots actually carry very little nutritional value for rabbits. The funniest part of that is that the original joke was a reference to a Clark Gable film where Gable munches on a carrot, it was never meant to imply that rabbits love carrots. The Clark Gable reference would’ve been obvious to audiences in the 40s but it has been pretty much lost to time.

Bugs Bunny has too much power and should be feared.

every so often a british writer has a character call ‘shotgun’ for a situation not involving a car, or even a mode of travel at all, and for some reason i find this absolutely adorable.

i thought of making a post to explain the history and usage of the term, but if i did that they might stop.

i’m an american and i don’t know the history. i guess it’s because people drive with a shotgun next to them?

nope.

ok i’ve been informed by a couple people that outside america, it just means ‘dibs’, so it’s unlikely they’ll give up being cute about it if i explain, so imma explain.

it comes from this:

see, once upon a time, the american west was very sparsely settled, and between the few towns there were lay hundreds of miles of wild animals, criminals, desperate ex-confederate soldiers with raging ptsd and more ammo than food, and semi-nomadic first nations bands who at any moment might be at war with the us government, each other, and/or local landowners, or just looking to make their name by taking some trophies and bragging rights.

so if you wanted to get mail, goods, or passengers from one place to another, you better be prepared to defend yourself and run like hell at the same time.

enter the shotgun rider.

see in the picture, the fella that’s not holding the reins has a long gun over his knee? he must be confident, that’s a bit longer than the usual coach gun. you’d load with shot instead of slugs because you wanted scatter – aiming from a galloping coach isn’t easy even for a sharpshooter, and the intent was to deter, not kill. you’d aim for your attackers’ horses if you were smart. a man with buckshot in him might chase you harder in anger, but a horse with a peppered flank was goddamn done with your nonsense.

of course, such exciting episodes weren’t going to occur on every trip. so as a matter of practicality, while keeping watch for attackers, the shotgun rider was also navigator, relief driver, snack-fetcher, and in charge of entertaining you so you didn’t nod off and drive your horses in a circle all night.

the modern usage is sometimes just ‘dibs the front passenger seat’, so i see how it became just for claiming stuff across the pond. but the general connotation is also that you’re the main support guy. the co-pilot, the map-decipherer, the one who phones ahead and asks mom if you need to pick anything up on the way back. it’s not just about getting to ride up front, it’s about being in charge of stuff, which is very appealing but also a responsibility.

and that’s why you don’t call ‘shotgun’ for things other than driving. because that’s the only situation, really, where you’re calling dibs on being somebody’s right-hand guy for a task.

driver still picks the music, tho. that’s a cosmic law.