Personally, I've Always Liked The Sound of Sapphist...

[4thofeleven]

There was a story on the news about the island of Lesbos's quixotic effort to reclaim the term 'Lesbian', and it got me thinking - how many other words are there that originally referred to a place or a people but now have completely unrelated meanings? I can only think of Lesbian, Philistine, Vandal, and Laconic...

Comments

[sunnyskywalker]

Gothic/Goth. Spartan seems too tied to its origins to really count. Hmm, things to ponder...

ETA: Jeans and denim, which now need have nothing to do with Genoa or Nim. Though the pronunciation has changed and the words no longer obviously refer to those cities, so maybe they don't count. Byzantine, maybe?

[4thofeleven.livejournal.com]

Damn, should have remembered Byzantine myself... huh, that's an interesting one; there mustn't have been much time after the term coming into common use to refer to the Eastern Roman Empire before it was taken over to mean convoluted...

Did not know that Jeans comes from Genoan!

[lyore.livejournal.com]

I never realised Laconic was connected to the Spartans. Huh.