Home » Segments » Let’s Untangle a Flaky Television Etymology

Let’s Untangle a Flaky Television Etymology

The creepy, dystopian, and weirdly wonderful TV series Severance offers a teachable moment in the form of a false etymology in a flaky self-help book by one of the characters. The book suggests that the word camaraderie derives from the type of a camera used to take photos, ideally photos of happy friends together. In reality, camaraderie goes back to the Latin word camera, or “room,” which gave rise to French camarade, “someone who shares a room,” and ultimately “a friend” or comrade. The English word for the photographic device, camera, is a shortening of an earlier Latin term, camera obscura, “literally, dark room,” the name for a kind of box with a lens that was used to project images on a wall for hundreds of years before photographs came along. This is part of a complete episode.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

More from this show

What Makes A Great Book Opening Line?

What makes a great first line of a book? How do the best authors put together an initial sentence that draws you in and makes you want to read more? We’re talking about the openings of such novels as George Orwell’s 1984...

Slip Someone a Mickey

To slip someone a mickey means to doctor a drink and give it to an unwitting recipient. The phrase goes back to Mickey Finn of the Lone Star Saloon in Chicago, who in the late 19th century was notorious for drugging certain customers and relieving...