Are some spiders poisonous? Are all animals that are venomous also poisonous? Also I’d like to say that there is no linguistic difference between the two in some languages. There is no distinction between the two in German for instance. It’s either giftig or it isn’t.
Original meaning seems to be something that was given. So a snake would gift you Poison just like snot nosed brats would gift you a cold during Thanksgiving dinner.
The word has been used as a euphemism for “poison” since Old High German, a semantic loan from Late Latin dosis (“dose”), from Ancient Greek δόσις (dósis, “gift; dose of medicine”).
I wondered how the heck it got that meaning. Pretty strange to apply a term for giving something in general to poison specifically.
Are some spiders poisonous? Are all animals that are venomous also poisonous? Also I’d like to say that there is no linguistic difference between the two in some languages. There is no distinction between the two in German for instance. It’s either giftig or it isn’t.
None that I know of. I think the OC was just mocking a bit on how some people can get so bent out of shape when the word is used colloquially.
It’s an unfortunate false friend that the German word Gift means poison in English.
Same root though. In Dutch it wasn’t differentiated until recently so the same word has vastly different meanings between Afrikaans and Dutch. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/gifte#Middle_Low_German
Original meaning seems to be something that was given. So a snake would gift you Poison just like snot nosed brats would gift you a cold during Thanksgiving dinner.
Same meaning as dose in that sense. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/dosis#Latin
I wondered how the heck it got that meaning. Pretty strange to apply a term for giving something in general to poison specifically.