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].

  • Cyrus DraegurEnglish
    22•2 years 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.

      • Cyrus DraegurEnglish
        11•2 years ago

        The Deathworlders,

        It’s a sprawling collaborative webseries that all but codified the “HFY” (Humanity, Fuck Yeah) / “Humans are Space Orcs” subgenre -
        -wherein our species discovers that, in the viewpoint of the rest of galactic society, WE are the terrifying scary space monsters.

        I love it to bits. You should at least read “The Kevin Jenkins Experience” which was its sort of “episode zero”/prototypical story. There are dozens of semi-canonical spin-off stories many others have based within this same “Jenkinsverse” setting.

      • PyroEnglish
        2•2 years 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
      2•2 years 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.

  • @Treczoks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15•2 years ago

    Hamburgl+(er]

    No, that was soemone else. The city is still called Hamburg, and the inhabitants Hamburger.

    • @turmacar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9•2 years ago

      Technically they’re not just fictional. People build little RC ones, they would just be incredibly complicated compared to even a helicopter to scale up and make controllable/powerful enough to carry people.

      One of the cooler flying mechanisms that seem to be a dead end.

    • EnkrodEnglish
      11•2 years ago

      No, Bürger means Citizen, Burger doesn’t really exist as a german word, but would mean “someone from a castle” or “someone doing something with castles”.

      Those Umlaut-Dots change the pronounciation and the meaning, they are important!