this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2023
130 points (96.4% liked)
Asklemmy
44151 readers
2869 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
From a quick search that didn't provide anything really insightful, it seems that at least in Italian the term has been used since the XIV century, so it's not photocopy related
Yeah, if copia sputata is so old there's no way that it's from those machines.
Digging further on the expression it seems to be old in English too, attested in 1689. And the only explanation that I've seen to account to Italian and English both having it is religious in nature - while not biblical it seems common the idea that God spat into the clay to create Adam.
Speaking on Italian: people (often native speakers) messing with the apostrophe bug me a bit, it's a good example for this thread. Specially un' followed by a masculine word; e.g. *un'altro for un altro. It tilts the autocompletion inside my brain, expecting a word and getting another in place. I'm not native speaker though so this likely plays a role.
Oh trust me, it happens a lot even between native speakers, and it irks me too haha