There's a saying in French, attributed to André Gide:
"Choisir, c'est renoncer" (to choose is to give up).
That said, the title posted here is disingenuous: "decide" is not at all related to death, it's related to "cut" or "remove", it just so happens that that root is coincidentally used with prefixes leading to "remove life". So at best it has deadly siblings, not origins.
In fact, I cannot see that title on the linked page, it seems to have been substituted from "Choices"?
What I’ve never understood with this comic is if the author admires philosophers or is mocking them. They frankly come
off as a bit kooky and out of touch with reality. Like your drunk uncle at Thanksgiving.
> "Choisir, c'est renoncer" (to choose is to give up).
This really resonates with me strongly.
Choice is usually portrayed as empowerment or a something you can do from position of empowerment. But choosing is resigning to your fate and loosing everything you have not chosen. The truly empowered are the ones that don't need to choose much.
And choice is not something you need to be empowered to do. There are really very few and very rare occasions where you truly have just one option. Usually when you think you have no choice, you really do, but you choose the current option that is not what you want because you still prefer it to all other you can imagine.
Awareness of that fact helped me in toughest times.
Let's look at it this way: getting to have your cake and eat it too is certainly better than having to choose between the two options, but not having a cake which you can decide to eat (i.e. not having a choice) is even worse...
That's a slight distortion of the original phrase, 'eat your cake and have it', and I think it makes more sense if you go to that meaning (to act, free of consequence). Otherwise, you're just saying that having the option to eat cake is better than not having the option to eat it, which would strike most people as being quite obvious.
You can't really eat cake without first having a cake to eat. If you eat it, you don't have cake any more; if you don't, you still have cake.
Therefore, if you want to eat your cake and have it, you want to do something but don't want the consequence of it.
Somehow I though the cake idiom was similar to that french one: “vouloir le beurre et l’argent du beurre” (to want butter and money for butter) but it seems to differ more than I thought!
It’s about trying to exchange butter for money but thinking you could somehow end up with both, either intentionally by rigging a zero sum game to someone’s detriment, or mistakenly through a leap of flawed logic when one does not realise it’s zero sum, and thinks it can be outgamed with enough swapping around.
That's some of the rare philosophical aspect of finance/trading. Every body has sold assets that ended up exploding (Tesla or else, and bitcoin amplified this, many people had millions in their hand virtually but gave it up for a pizza).
It teaches you not to focus on regret and only care about risk/satisfaction ratio, and to keep moving.
This topic also tailor your sense of self too. When you made a few too many bad choices (job, relationship, location) you get a finer sense of what you want.
I read this and thought maybe we as a culture are too hung up on empowerment, power, power-seeking, etc. You say true power is not needing to choose, I say why is it important to seek power at all?
I think the desire for power is understandable. We need to be able to adapt our environments, and adapt ourself to our environments, in order to survive. Arguably, power is the extent to which we can achieve that.
But you could look at it like this: by not choosing you are losing what you could have gained. I think. Maybe you are choosing the most optimal option, and giving up the lesser ones.
Much of 'overengineering' is refusing to make a choice.
I think I would classify that act as making a different choice, but not everybody sees it that way.
What works better is to identify reversible decisions and just make them, clearing the deck for those that do have serious opportunity costs associated with them.
In English, the equivalent is often expressed as "The Road not Taken", from Robert Frost's poem of the same name.
The two, though contemporaries, could not be more different in my mind, and that is represented in the clarity of the short statement vs short poem. Yet the underlying loss expressed’ is the same.
(I don't intend to get into lit crit: the last line of the poem heads in an additional direction, but that's the difference between three words and a few hundred)
In a related sense, philosophically, gaining knowledge can be seen as narrowing down the ways in which things might be.
In practice, however, gaining knowledge often increases our awareness of how things might be even faster than it removes possibilities that we formerly considered: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio..."
If people are interested in etymology, I highly recommend the youtube channel Alliterative which goes over etymological connections and teaches history through language.
It's a fascinating channel and very unique style of videos. Here's one of my favourites, on colors:
I can't say I liked it. Looks like a loosely-associated bag of trivia, that can trace the words only as far as latin or proto-germanic and then resorts to wild guesses. It skips over associations 'downstream' too, e.g. "Greek word leukos giving us leukemia" - which is a neoplasm of leukocytes (white blood cells) which take their name from a white layer following centrifugation of a blood sample. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffy_coat
> I can't say I liked it. Looks like a loosely-associated bag of trivia
As a fan of etymology, I'd have to agree. It went so quickly between facts that I didn't recall the previous facts and barely had time to pay attention to the current facts, before it moved on. I'm also not a fan of the layout. One much shorter video focusing on one color would've been a lot better for me, then rinse and repeat. As for the layout, I would have it show the presenter talking while in the top corner the images are shown. Something less visually distracting.
My feeling is that etymology-focused content is hard to produce. I've seen several channels or podcasts and they all fall short in a few areas.
Interesting. The german word entscheiden (decide) is also based on scheiden (to part) as in Scheidung (divorce) and dahinscheiden (to die slowly). And even more meanings from the same root-word.
This is called a calque. After Latin became the prestige language if Western Europe, German coined new words on the basis of the Latin by matching the Latin prefix and root to German equivalents. There are many, many examples.
Thank you for the word! I saw this pattern many times while learning German and it is difficult to articulate the the feeling of linguistic connectedness to somebody who doesn’t have an interest in other languages. This term helps :-)
Interesting. Explains why for example the French for "we have to decide" is translated as "il faut trancher" (trancher = to slice)
I was wondering about Dutch, where the verb is "beslissen". But from what I gather from a (superficial) search, that comes from "beslitsen", which again comes from "splitsen" (breaking apart).
Wondering now if the French expression for "making a difficult choice" has anything to do with it ("faire la part des choses" -> "breaking things up")
"Faire la part des choses" is more like taking into account every parts of a problem before making a decision. literally, having each parts of a problem separated and judging advantages or disadvantages of each before making a decision.
I also heard it said when someone was forced to take a decision knowing there would be bad consequences, as reassuring, like meaning "what ever one choose something bad AND something good comes from every decisions"...
"Faire la part des choses" calls for some sort of analysis, which has greek roots, but amusingly that's almost the same thing: analysis itself has a root (-lysis) that means "decompose" which is not too far from "cutting into little pieces". It is also connected to "resolve", which also can mean "decide" or "terminate".
I was about to say this. All in all there are very few ideas in our heads. But time and space gave thousands of various twists on which word will root the idiom.
I think that may be the missing link here. It's probably from German beschließen, which would have been translated part by part as besluiten in Dutch, but in this case they took over the German word with the t -> ss high German consonant shift.
> I was wondering about Dutch, where the verb is "beslissen". But from what I gather from a (superficial) search, that comes from "beslitsen", which again comes from "splitsen" (breaking apart).
Do you have this source? all I can found is that it's from Middle Dutch “slissen” which meant “to end” but it isn't terribly well sourced.
Yeah, I think it is more likely that it is related to German "(be)schließen", Swedish "(be)sluta" etc. which originally means "close, shut, join together, lock up" etc.
OTOH, that verb usually corresponds to Dutch "sluiten". "(be)slissen" seems to mean the same as "(be)sluiten", but with a different etymology. I'm not sure whether it fits chronologically, but perhaps it is a loan from German or a development, atypical for Dutch, but similar to that in German?
In practice the verb is suppletive with it's synonym “besluiten”. In theory both can be used interchangeably but there seems to be a strong favor to use “beslissen” in the præsent imperfect, and “besluiten” in all other tenses and “aspects”.
During my (as said before ! =) short search on "beslissen etymologie" I found [1]. Which seems to list lemmas from several dictionaries, that span a time period of almost a century, and that do not always arrive at the same conclusion.
They sort of confirmed the conclusion I always arrive at : etymology is 50% guesswork
According to [1] the Dutch beslissen comes from the prefix "be" ("to") and "slissen" ("resolving a conflict or problem").
I like "to resolve a conflict" more than "to kill" :-) Fits well in the poldermodel too!
Slissen is no longer used in modern Dutch for this, but used for "lisp" instead, but that didn't arrive until the early 20th century and seems to have an unrelated etymology which I can't seem to find right now; it could just be phonetic, or perhaps it's related in some strange way after all.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was translated as such somewhere though. I remember "root" (as in, root path, and root process) being translated to "wortel" in old versions of Gnome. You had stuff like "Wortelproces" and "wortelpad".
This was over 15 years ago; I'm sure it's better now.
Personally I'd just leave it as "root". I looked a bit at the current Gnome translation files as I was curious, and "root user" is translated as "root-gebruiker", and "Filesystem root" as "Bestandssysteem root".
Git doesn't have a Dutch translation, but it does have a German and "root" is translated as "Wurzelverzeichnis ("Wurzel" being root, and "verzeichnis" being directory). It does translate "root commit" as just "root commit" though. "Root nodes" are "Hauptwurzeln".
Technically it's correct, but as a Dutch/German speaker I'd find translating root in such a way surprising and confusing, even though it's a correct translation. Perhaps that's also because I'm so used to the English, but even as a Dutch or German user you'll likely find English documentation/help regardless, and having the same technical terms is useful there. Consistency is important, but generally speaking translating technical English terms too enthusiastically is probably more confusing than helpful.
Actually, I just remembered that "show threads" was translated as "draden tonen" (I can't find the current translation of this in GNOME, procps-ng leaves it as "threads" in the German translation).
I also noticed that "parent/child relationships between processes" in GNOME is translated as "Moeder/dochter-relatie tussen processen", which seems rather awkward to me, but leaving it as just "parent" and "child" doesn't seem great either.
Translating stuff is hard, and it gets harder the more technical it gets :-/ Something like an email client probably isn't too hard, but technical tools like process monitors? I don't envy the people working on that.
Yes, I did think of that. But I think that has it's origins mostly in the Gordian Knot, a legend where Alexander the Great supposedly cut a knot when he did not how to untie it.
If people are interested in diving deeper into etymologies, I made an app that allows you to visually explore all the roots, descendants, or relatives of a word: https://etymologyexplorer.com
Yes, this is the site that inspired me! I was frustrated that it was so hard to navigate to cognates (word cousins) or from roots to descendants. So mine is focused on navigating between words like that
This is why it's important to think of decisions and choices differently. It's useful to think of a choice as something that submits you to the options presented, whereas a decision is necessarily made under uncertainty. It's worth thinking of them as the difference between perfect and imperfect information games, and the strategies for people who make decisions vs. those who make choices are using a different locus of control. A choice assumes an external locus, where a decision exercises an internal one.
Some people are very good at selecting among options, others are good at acting under uncertainty. It's important to recognize what kind of information problem you are solving, and whether you need to employ a choice or a decision strategy.
There are a bunch of these english synonyms that confuse and conflate some very important differences, and I think this is one of them.
I remember reading about this a while back that it’s cut as in ‘to cut off from all other possibility’
Not sure many people make decisions that definitively anymore!
Priority is another one that used to be about only having on thing that is the priority, but later got diluted with words like prioritise where it’s just about having an order of importance, not one specific all encompassing purpose.
For a moment I thought this was going to go the route of Julian Jaynes' "On the Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" and claim that it actually came from something closer to deicide—the killing of a god—in that making a decision was disobeying the orders of the gods (voices) in your head. A pretty interesting, if controversial, book.
> I must say, as a spoken-Latin advocate, that, while Latin can be frustrating when you want to talk about things like a malfunctioning ATM or the difficulty one has signing up for a user account, when you're as angry a person as I am it's quite useful to have so many words with which to imagine people's violent ends.
“Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.”
While it's possible that decide can be traced back to caedere (to cut, kill), it's also plausibly related to cadere (to fall, die; more relevantly, come to pass). The latter etymology also gives rise to words like "coincidence" (things happened together) and even "casual" (happened [by chance]).
The Romans used a lot of euphemisms for death ("gave up his breath" is a common one, which gives rise to "expire").
Making a decision is to cut away all other choices, leaving only one. It's why making a decision is so powerful: other choices are off the table and we're free to pursue a single option.
It's kinda the era of paradox of choice / abundance.
We have access to everything all the time. Its probably linked to the addiction disorders online.
It's not hard to guess how people knew how to decide better when things had more weight or were more critical. Cold, food, drought, disease, energy.. when everything is tight your brain is sharper too.
They didn't "know how to decide better", they just had fewer choices to make and much less information about results. Was it "better" to destroy this or that ecosystem, or consume resources to the point earth ran dry, or start random wars for "honor"? No, but they did it anyway - until they figured out it was a bad idea.
Same: they couldn't decide what they'd become, they were largely expected to follow family tradition. Was it "better" to become a ironmonger because your dad was, even if you're completely hopeless at ironmongering, because the alternative is being disavowed or banished...?
IMO (and I'd bet money that) 1000 years ago, if your village was good at <insert tradition> you knew clearly that it was the best choice at the time, and deviating from that was a life-or-death risk. Those who still felt like it left, they walked away, explored, died a lonely death or made it to a new place and came back, some became merchants.. or else.
I still hold the contrast made the decision clearer, if you don't have the vision or grit to go against your local environment then it's simply better for you to follow it, at least it works.
Knowing the origin of the word helps choosing and deciding. The hard part isn't figuring out which choice you like more, it's which you're more ready to kill, but most people focus on which they like more.
Well, poreshit' is really just the perfectum form of reshit', so the real meaning is just "decide". The meaning "kill" is just slang, sort of like "do someone in".
Suicide, homicide, genocide. Whenever I feel conflicted about a decision I feel like I’m killing an option. It’s a dramatic framework, and probably why I’m not decisive.
Disagree. We clearly benefit from identifying patterns, and statistics is a powerful tool. Do we sometimes misclassify? Sure. But if we stopped to talk to everyone in the city we'd get nothing done.
> (adjective) giving a lot of information clearly and in a few words; brief but comprehensive.
Also in italian (and possibly other romance languages) the meaning is "short, to the point", the etymology evokes the "cutting" ("cesoie", scissors), but nothing evoking the "two birds" metaphor.
what evokes it for me is the con- prefix, which means "together" or "with". Concise should mean something like "together-cut".
I did look it up, and the latin dictionaries give "fallen together" or "fallen into pieces", and it also seems to be used for slaughter. "With cuts" or "cut up".
Interestingly some etymologies give the original verb as concido (from cado, "fall", not "cut"). So the etymology of concisus (concise) could also be an expression of "squishing together".
since you can kill by cutting, it's hard to to disentangle the killing from the mere cutting.
An anecdote: in Italy you can often see the "scissors" hand gestures when the interlocutor wants you to get to the point. I don't know how ancient people came up with the word, but the killing metaphor seems a bit of a stretch; perhaps cutting one's tongue would be enough!
Half joking. However I find the claim that the observation I made was "childish" sad. Seems like some people just live with the need to dismiss anything that doesn't align 100% with their worldview as infantile.
"Choisir, c'est renoncer" (to choose is to give up).
That said, the title posted here is disingenuous: "decide" is not at all related to death, it's related to "cut" or "remove", it just so happens that that root is coincidentally used with prefixes leading to "remove life". So at best it has deadly siblings, not origins.
In fact, I cannot see that title on the linked page, it seems to have been substituted from "Choices"?