Wednesday 15 August 2018

Thought for Thursday

Yet another example of how one - or at least I - can be with something, in this case a word, for years without noticing what, after the event, seems obvious.

So this morning I read that '... the term aviation itself is derived from the Latin "avis" for "bird" ...'. Which I don't think I had noticed before, despite knowing, or at least knowing of, the Latin in question and which is even more irritating when I think that the first language of the writers is unlikely to be English.

OED not much  help on this occasion, aviation not having been invented at the time my copy was compiled, but it does offer aviary, which suggests that one could, on a good day, have worked out what the derivations of aviation and aviator were. And, oddly, with a publication date of 1888 but a dedication (to Queen Victoria) date of 1897. From which we deduce that I must have some kind of a reprint.

Reference 1: The morphospace of consciousness - Arsiwalla, X. D., Moulin-Frier, C., Herreros, I., Sanchez-Fibla, M., and Verschure, P. F. – 2017.

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