English will never be something I fully understand
In: 9830
People who use English learn words from eachother, and sometimes those words become expressions. Expressions are very quick ways to talk with other people. They include things like compliments to make them feel good, or insults to make them feel bad. Another type are greetings. Good morning is an expression and a greeting that actually means something like “hello”. But people say it even when the morning is actually very bad.
Terrible and terrific come from the same place that terror does. It sounds weird, but when something is supposed to be scary, terrific and terrible can both be compliments. Terrific probably became a compliment because many people in the past used it that way, maybe to tell their children how scary they were on Halloween.
Horrible and horrific have a similar story. They both come from the word horror. The difference is that people didn’t use them as expressions enough to change their meanings, maybe because nobody wants to feel horror.
The real story is a lot more complicated, and we can never talk to the thousands of people who changed the words we use. Many times through history, people decided languages needed to be easier and then fixed mistakes like this. Other times, the mistake survives so long that it isn’t easy to see. And then, only language professors remember it was a mistake. Tracing a word through the past is a science called etymology, and you can google a word with “etymology” to find answers. Those answers are also part of a bigger science about languages called linguistics.
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