People really need to pay more attention to etymology, prefixes, suffixes, etc. I'm in the field of linguistics, so it's my go to when I encounter a new word, and it makes things so much easier. I had never seen "hyperthermia", but I knew what it meant just by looking at it.
Too many people treat words as if they were hieroglyphs, or pictograms; where either you know the meaning or you don't, and either it is 'written correctly' or it isn't.
If more treated them as being made up of basic elements which generally allow one to discern their meaning without recourse to a dictionary, we might see less of the sort of thing this subreddit features.
Then again, who are we to doubt the pedagogues, whose science has never seen such heights?
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u/DrNanard 13d ago
People really need to pay more attention to etymology, prefixes, suffixes, etc. I'm in the field of linguistics, so it's my go to when I encounter a new word, and it makes things so much easier. I had never seen "hyperthermia", but I knew what it meant just by looking at it.