Don’t drink fant drinks when you drive!
Fanta: 😟
According to wiktionary infant comes from the Latin word infans, meaning “unable to speak”. The term fans means “to speak”.
Not sure if your Fanta can speak though :P
As a side note here, Fanta was derived from the German word „Fantasie“. I don’t think it needs translating.
🇬🇧 fantasy
🇮🇹 fantasia
🇫🇷 fantaisie
🇨🇿 fantazie
🇸🇰 fantazia
🇷🇺 фантазия
🇩🇪 FANTASIE
So it wouldn’t be technically wrong to refer to mute people as infants right? /s
Probably falls into the same or similar category as calling them dumb, ones open a time an acceptable word to call them, but not really today. You know unless you are looking to insult them for being mute.
Right. The term that would probably fit the context would be “infantile”, which again has negative connotations.
English has a long history of descriptors of intellectual deficiencies becoming contemporary insults then terms to be avoided because of that insensitive use, then the use continuing until everyone’s kinda desensitized to it but now it can’t be used in the original context.
See also: idiot, imbecile, moron, etc.
Currently going through that process: “retarded”.
If infancy is childhood, is adulthood fancy?
The in is not a prefix here. That’s just how the word is spelled.
Actually, it is.
It derives from Latin infans where “in-” is a negation prefix and “fans” is the present participle form of “for”, which translates to “to speak”.
So an infant is a non-speaker (too small to speak).
But my opener was of course a joke, where I purpously misunderstood what “fant” is derived of, by claiming that “fant” must be the opposite of a child, thus an adult.
There are tons of Latin words in the English language and many of them only survived in English in their compounded form (e.g. “in-fant”, where no other version of the actual verb in there survived, except the negated form).
Often the parts of these Latin root words have no meaning at all anymore in English, so that people don’t notice that they are actually using compound words and also the original meaning of the word is forgotten.
Not a lot of people would associate “infant” with “hearing”.
