The shocking meaning of 9 common words (that you use everyday...)

You are using the word comfort wrong. Democracy and demon both come from the same Latin root. Dig below the surface of everyday language and you often find twisted origin stories. A memo about the dark side of "humility," the real meaning of "ambition," and more. 👇🏻

Comfort today means rest and relaxation. But here's something strange. Notice the "fort" in comfort? The Latin meaning of comfort is to fortify - to make stronger. In the original sense, comfort was the period of rest that readied you to fight again. Fortification of spirit.

Humility has been fashionable for about two thousand years. The Christian virtue of meekness is now seeped into the collective consciousness. But note that humility and humiliated have the same origin. Can humility just be cover for a soul running low on confidence?

Thomas Carlyle writes in his classic On Hero-Worship in History that the word worship can be broken into worth-ship. To worship someone is to revere a being worth the respect. Perhaps worshipping God is nothing but respecting ideals that are worth the reverence.

AMBITION has the same root word as amble and ambassador: ambi. In the mediaeval sense ambition was deeply twined with going around, ambling, physically spreading yourself. This sense needs to come back - you cannot be ambitious sitting in a room all day, everyday.

Buddha: Desire is the root cause of all suffering. But human beings create art, tech and other humans out of desire. Latin root for desire is "de sidere," which translates to "from the stars." Perhaps intense desires are a gift from the Gods above. A gift of direction.

Here's a conversation starter for the next date or dinner party. The words conversation, convert, and converge have the same Indo-European root. To converse is to converge to the same position over time. Conversation, over a long enough timeline, IS conversion.

Socrates' biggest advisor: his daemon. This meant spirit/inner oracle in his time. The word then became demon over time - a spirit with evil connotations. But even the word democracy is related - which is, after all, politics run by the inner spirit and/or demons of the public.

They say art is subjective. But is it, really? Art is related to artificial. This linguistic link alone gives us a pretty objective definition of art. Art is our human artifice (mask) over the naked face of nature. Art is everything we add to nature. Good art = positive additions

At a university campus, Peter Thiel once pointed out that the opposite of di-versity is uni-versity. Thiel is ever the provocateur, but this does raise an interesting question: Why do universities - ostensibly meant to expand perspectives - share the same root as uniformity?