Cynicism has that almost sinister (catch the sound alike?) sound....
I think sinister is from Latin, and cynicism is from Greek. It may have traveled thru Latin, though. The Roman empire took a lot of mythology and philosophy from Greek, and tried to make it their own.
Sinister means evil or ominous, and came thru Middle English from Old French, from Latin.
Cynical means suspicious or thinking all men are motivated by selfishness, which came thru Latin from Greek, of course. I copied that defination from the dictionary, so please don't accuse me of being sexist.
Thanks to Kevin Hogan for the idea for this article. I read Kevin Hogan's newsletter (Coffee) and articles every week. I think they are brilliant.
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1 comment:
I'm an undergrad student of both Latin and Greek, and I would like to point out an interesting fact that, although they seem similar in English, they sound quite different and stem from quite different words. For the most part, "sinister" sounds in Latin how we would say it in English, but "cynicism" on the other hand, in the Attic Greek, stems from the word "kynikos" which would sound more like a "k" followed by a French or umlauted "u", carrying to the "n" and so on (Greek didn't have our soft "c" sound other than for "s"). This word "kynikos" or "cynic" means "doglike". The Romans did in fact adopt this word into "cynicus" with the same basic pronounciation in tact, which is a school of philosophical thought or a student thereof.
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