subscribe—comes from “underwrite” sub—beneath, scribe—sign at bottom of document. Only subscribe if you’re a notary public†.

† notary public has the same wavelength as attorneys general (adjective and descriptor retaining their word order, both legal, and also weirdly, both public)… notarius publicus was the Roman public scribe††. I wonder if there’s a notary private, or notary digital?

†† There she is again—scribe comes perhaps from describe, which, like subscribe, means write down (“de”)… another funky etymological coïncidence with sub-(also down(?))-scribe.

Etymology has a funny way of making you “see” words where formerly you didn’t, or have never needed or bothered to think of them as compounds. This happened to me when I was learning Swedish, which has the quirky germanic thing of making huge words by just putting them together. Two examples that tickled me were the word for artificial—konstgjord—which is konst†, art, plus gjord— past tense of make. Artfully made. And, stay with me, you see it happening there, if you’ve taken a romance language class ever. Artificial—full of art, ficial… facere… past participle of facio, to make or do.

† konst + ig makes '“strange, funky” heh

I won’t insult The Intelligence here with “anything’.

Or here.

Well, hmm, we see unity, and comm, common, communicate. “communis”—common… communism (let’s not)… but, where it is interesting is from communis’s etymology itself:

From Old Latin co(m)moinis, from Proto-Italic *kommoinis, from Proto-Indo-European *ḱom-moy-ni-s, from *mey- (“to change”).

And here we see a reference to one of the coolest parts of linguistics: that all† modern languages that have diverged immensely can be traced back to some proto-languages††, like Indo-European. And to not simply stop at eurocentrism, the other tiers at this level are: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo, Austronesian, Dravidian, Turkic, Uralic, Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai, Altaic, and Caucasian.

† Or, almost all, with the exception of a cool few “langauge isolates” like Basque which do not fit into any of these, like Ainu around Northern Japan or Shabo around Ethiopia.

†† And indeed, it doesn’t stop there, but beyond you get into hazy, theoretical waters, PhD mists enveloping, and the “Proto-Indo-European” or “Proto-Niger-Congo” classifications appear.