Why do people say "fatally electrocute", or use electrocution as a way to describe a non-lethal electric shock? Electrocution is a portmanteau of "electric execution." If you are electrocuted, you are dead.
Why do people say "fatally electrocute", or use electrocution as a way to describe a non-lethal electric shock?
When I watch nature documentaries with electric eels, they always describe how the electric eel stuns its prey by firing discharges into the water as it hunts.
Never heard the word "electrocute" when this electric eel behavior is described
I'm sure an electric eel CAN kill some fish with its shocks, but stunning is accurate because most of the time the prey is just insensate. What kills the prey is the eels teeth.
Lmao bro wtf have you been pondering
Wrong. I was wearing wool stocks and walking around on the carpet the other day and when I touched the lightswitch I got a bad electrocution. Bur I'm doing fine now, just had to cry it out.
because electric executions are no longer a thing and deaths by electric shock are more and more rare as laws get more strict and technology improves the safety of electrical installations.
It's more common to recieve a non-fatal shock than a fatal one and it's convenient to describe that simply as an electrocution
>because electric executions are no longer a thing
homie at least eight states still use the electric chair.
but when was the last time they actually used the chair
Interesting.
The "proper" word for "give an electric shock, not necessarily lethal" is (was) "electrify".
But then, as often happens, "electrify" started being used metaphorically. "The news electrified him."
The metaphorical use was a lot more common than the literal use, so (as often happens) it just took over.
So "electrocute" then slid over to cover the "real", literal use of "electrify", as well as its own original use.
Sometimes these changes are good, sometimes they're bad. Not sure about this one. Is there another word for "electrify" in its current (metaphorical) sense?
magnetize, mesmerize (both undergone a similar development, from animal magnetism)
Shock. But not "shocked", as that conveys amazement.
Usage evolves, words gain new meanings.
The metaphorical use of "electric" goes back a good few centuries and to its earliest usage, at least to the mid 17th and the metaphorical usage of "electrify" almost certainly developed from it. OED is surprisingly lacking here, they give some of the metaphorical uses for "electric" but provide no definitions on metaphorical usage and all variants of "electric" and stick to the literal, but there are a great deal of historical related words like "electrum" which was a name for amber and where we get our first mention of "electric" from rubbing amber to create a static change way back in 1600. Electrum is also another name for an alloy of gold and silver which presumably has an amber color (OED dropping the ball again here), another name for electrum being electron.
Lots of missing pieces in this puzzle, the entries for this group of words is fairly interesting once you get past the stemgay which the OED for some reason provided a surprising amount of essentially redundant usage examples and few definitions. I suspect this is probably a result of not really knowing what the "electric" was, the word and its variants probably lack consistent enough usage to sanely document in a dictionary during that gap.
OED does not seem to agree with you on that, at least not on my quick check. Care to elaborate?
You can touch a power line and survive, but you'd never call it anything other than electrocuted.
language changes. slang gets incorporated into the official vocabulary all the time.
What if the initial electrocution kills you but the continued electrification revives you? What are our parameters on "fatally" here? Do you get annoyed about hanged/hung too?
Near-lethal would be a safe use, being tantamount, proximate, near-enough to lethality to cause the real possibility or reasonable fear of death. The problem lies more it the lack of purposefullness which "execute" neccessarily implies. There is no plan being carried out in an accidental electrocution, fatal or near-fatal.
Because the word "shock" has no impact. It can be used to describe tiny little shocks one would receive from a woolen blanket.
The word is so overused that it's become sarcastic to say something is "shocking".
The word "electrocute" has come to fill the void of near-lethal adjective in the normie's mind; it sounds scientific, medical even.
It doesn't have the psychological connotation, it is purely a physical phenomena.
Should we say "zap" instead?
Zap is cute. “Oh Homey, I got zapped!”
>language evolves over time!!!!
Oh, is that right?
Or does it devolve?
Maybe I refuse to acknowledge words/definitions/grammar that I don't consider to be beautiful or that was invented by people I don't like.
For example, "funny."
>Funny (adj.) "humorous," 1756, from fun (n.) + -y (2). Meaning "strange, odd, causing perplexity" is by 1806, said to be originally U.S. Southern (marked as colloquial in Century Dictionary).
>U.S Southern
Why should I use a word invented by Southerners? You don't own my mind!!!
Almost all contemporary language is a collection of historical mistakes. Attempts to correct or purify a language often devolve into mere elevation of the mistakes of 100-200 years ago to canon.
Execute means to carry out a plan, its use for the special case of judicial homocide is a euphemism. If they planned to shock themselves then electrocute is perfectly valid as the execution of an electrifcation plan, if unplanned then the providence of God planned the electrifying and the usage remains valid.