• Yhmg@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It’s a cool story but not entirely true

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientist

    Whewell proposed the word again more seriously (and not anonymously) in his 1840[31] The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences:

    The terminations ize (rather than ise), ism, and ist, are applied to words of all origins: thus we have to pulverize, to colonize, Witticism, Heathenism, Journalist, Tobacconist. Hence we may make such words when they are wanted. As we cannot use physician for a cultivator of physics, I have called him a Physicist. We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a Scientist. Thus we might say, that as an Artist is a Musician, Painter, or Poet, a Scientist is a Mathematician, Physicist, or Naturalist.

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        1 year ago

        I found it interesting to learn “Scientist” is such a new word though! I assumed it was some ancient word, not something some guy just sat down and came up with pretty recently