Words that sound fake
Jun. 25th, 2014 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_whomThe opposite of a placebo is a nocebo—a placebo is a treatment that helps the patient somehow despite having no direct physiological effect, and a nocebo is a treatment that harms the patient despite etc. And the word nocebo looks like it's just a kind of juvenile portmanteau of no and placebo (what do you call a robot that doesn't work? A no-bot?), but it's actually just Latin for 'I will harm'.
A lot of Latin words end in -us, including a lot of Latin words English speakers might recognize, and so a common method of forming fake Latin words is just adding -us onto the ends of things—like in those Road Runner cartoons where the Coyote is given Latin names like "Famishus Vulgarus" or "Eatibus Anythingus". So you could be forgiven for thinking that the interjection heus! is a made-up cod-Latin version of the English hey!—but no, heus! actually is Latin for 'hey!'
A lot of Latin words end in -us, including a lot of Latin words English speakers might recognize, and so a common method of forming fake Latin words is just adding -us onto the ends of things—like in those Road Runner cartoons where the Coyote is given Latin names like "Famishus Vulgarus" or "Eatibus Anythingus". So you could be forgiven for thinking that the interjection heus! is a made-up cod-Latin version of the English hey!—but no, heus! actually is Latin for 'hey!'
