People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw avocados

 You know, usually it takes most people more than a few posts to have a dramatic follow-up. But I guess when you don't know much, it's easy to have to correct yourself.

So remember when I was ostensibly marveling at language change but also kind of mocking the French for dropping their word that means "not" and replacing it with something else. And then being all French about it for hundreds of years? Well... we did the same thing. Pretty much exactly.

You know what the English word negative signifier used to be? Ne. Just like French. Because they both came from Latin. Duh. And then we started to add this little affectation on the end of our negatives, ne-a-wiht, which like it looks, meant not a whit, not a bit, not even a thing.

• So you might have said, over a thousand years ago, "I ne like avocado on my toast, ne-a-wiht." Or, you'd say that, but with all the proper old-timey words, but you get the gist, right? You don't want a bit of avocado on your toast because you're a lunatic.
• By the 10th century, it was contracted to nawiht. "I ne like avocado on my toast nawiht." And they burned you at the stake for heresy.
• Then nawt. You see where this is going, right?
• Then, eventually ... not. "I ne like avocado on my toast not."
• And then, of course, we went and dropped the ne. "I like avocado on my toast not." Sounds perfectly Shakespearean, doesn't it? Eventually, we moved where the marker lives in the sentence, and the rest is... linguistic history.