Generate the answer for a given question. The question requires common knowledge of English. Make sure that the answer is in detail, long, consistent with the context, and requires general knowledge of English. To be less repetitive, please vary your language for each question. Give a proper explanation to answer, and if necessary, provide the definition of various terms. And conclude your answer if it's long. If you have used other resources (e.g., Merriam Webster's.) to answer the question, include citations in your answer. You don't need to paraphrase the context of your resources, but make sure that your answer is consistent and complete.

Ex Input:
Is there an etymological link between medicine and the Ancient Greek () meaning laugh or smile (as seen in Book 1 of the Iliad)? I hope this is the correct place to ask this. I wondered if there was a link due to the phrase 'laughter is the best medicine'. I also wondered if linked to the belief in Ancient Greece (eg, at Epidaurus Theatre) that laughter and theatre had an effect on well-being and health (there was a healing centre next to the theatre). I've looked briefly at various websites, most of whom mention the Latin origin, but I was interested in seeing whether there might be a different route anyone knew of.

Ex Output:
No, there is no link. There are three main aspects to this, and all three of them agree fairly conclusively that there is precious little possibility that Greek has anything to do with medicine through the proverb 'laughter is the best medicine': there's the well-established Latin origin of the word medicine, the Greek verb itself, and the English proverb. The Latin origin As Josh's answer states, it is well-established that the word medicine comes to us through French from Latin, based ultimately on the verb medeor, which in Latin means only 'heal, cure, remedy, amend, correct, relieve'. Further back, that verb comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *med-, which originally meant 'measure, limit, consider, weight out, etc.'. Its meaning represents a semantic shift in that root which was specific to the Italic languages, however. The Greek cognates to the Latin verb (active and middle ), thus mean, respectively, 'protect, rule over' (representing a semantic shift specific to Greek) and 'provide for, think on, be mindful of, bethink one of'. Of the Latin verb, de Vaan says: The meaning of medeor is based on a semantic shift from 'measure' to 'distribute a cure, heal'. For a PIE stative verb (as assumed by LIV) or a frequentative, the e-grade in med- would be surprising. If the intermediate phase was 'to judge' (cf. meditor), medeor and its e-grade may have been grafted on the noun *medo(s)- 'judgement, law' (> modus) seen in U[mbrian] mers, mers 'law'. We can then regard it as a stative verb *med-e- 'to be a judge' > 'to be a healer, to heal' which was formed within Italic. The three essential things to note here are: that this sense of the base verb and its form were formed within the Italic branch of Indo-European languages; that the same root is attested in Greek with a different meaningand also a different form to the verb ; that the phonemic/phonetic form of the word 'medicine' in English, /md(i)sn/, is somewhat coincidental and bears no relation to its Latin forebearer. Medicus, the immediate ancestor, would be /medikus/ with a /k/ sound, like medical rather than medicine. The change from /k/ to /s/ did not happen until some time in Vulgar Latin, around a thousand years after the Iliad was en vogue. And of course the derivational base of Latin medicus is a verb that doesn't have any consonant there at all: the consonant is part of the adjectivising suffix, not the root. So the only thing left in common with the English word medicine is the stem med-. The Greek verb The verb form you're asking about here, , does not really mean 'laugh or smile' as such, but rather 'he/she/it smiled': it is the third person singular aorist form of the verb 'smile'. Moreover, it's an extended variant of that form: the base form is , without the ephelcystic nu, which gets rid of the n in medicine. Get rid of the further conditioning that this in an inflected aorist form (which very rarely form the basis for creating nouns), and you also lose the /s/, since that is the aorist marker. You then, again, have only a verbal root in common, this time meid-. Of course, that immediately raises the problem that meid- and med- are not the same thing: both English and Greek (and Latin, for that matter) have both, and they are not interchangeable. Greek words with -ei- do not normally end up yielding English // (that is, a short 'eh' sound). Even if that weren't enough to reject the theory, however, there is the fact that the Greek verb also has quite a satisfactory etymology: it is one of several extensions to the Proto-Indo-European root *(s)meih2-, whose base meaning is quite simply 'smile, be glad, laugh, be mirthful'. The extension that has survived in Greek here has a *-d-, while others have an *-r- or an *-l-. The reason the Greek verb begins with an m is quite simply that initial *sm- regularly loses its *s; the same happens with *sn-, which becomes just *n-.1 The same root is also behind the Latin adjective mirus (with the *-r- extension) and its derivatives (including words like miracle and admire): Latin underwent the same simplification of the initial cluster as Greek did. (The meaning of mirus 'wonderful, marvellous, amazing' represents another semantic shift that only happened within the Italic languages, or perhaps just within Latin itself.) In contrast, the Germanic languages were quite happy to keep *sm- unchanged, and the *smeih2- root also shows up as verbs here, indeed with both *-r- and *-l- extensions. The modern English forms of those verbs are smirk and smile. So with all that, the only part of medicine and that ends up being actually comparable is the m and the d. Not much, especially when you consider that both the proposed ancestors hereviz., Latin medeor and Greek have cognates in the opposite language that don't fit the form. The English proverb Finally, there is the question of the proverb that 'laughter is the best medicine'. While I don't think anyone knows for sure how old that particular turn of phrase is, it seems unlikely that it is as old as the Iliad. Proverbs 17:22 states that: A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones. which is rather close to being the same sentiment. But it still seems fairly far-fetched as links goespecially when you consider that, as far as I can figure out, the classical Greek translation of that particular place used an entirely different word (my emphasis): , . The verb used for being cheerful here is 'cheer, make glad, be merry'; and the word loosely translatable as 'medicine' is , which literally means 'cause to be in a good condition'. So the Greek version really says,'A cheerful heart makes you in good condition', which is a fair distance from 'laughter is the best medicine'. Notes: If we're being precise, the initial s in this root is a so-called s-mobile, which means that even in Proto-Indo-European itself there seems to have been some vacillation between whether it was there or not. It showed up in some dialects/forms/cases/contexts, but not in others. That isn't particularly important in this case, though, since we're mostly dealing with two languages where it would have been lost anyway. There is at least some indirect evidence that both Greek and Latin did have the *s in this root originally: If it is correct that the word cosmis on the Duenos inscription is the same word, with the same meaning, as Classical Latin comis 'kind, gracious, affable, elegant', and that it represents an earlier *kom-smi- 'who has a smile', then the Early Latin form shows there was an original s there. If the Epic Greek form is an actual, historically justifiable form (rather than just a spurious variant to make it fit the metre by doubling the consonant), then it almost certainly represents *filo-hmeidas from earlier *filo-smeid-as, with the (in the compound not) initial *s.


Ex Input:
My spellchecker insists on replacing 'furthest' with 'farthest'. I was under the impression that farthest is strictly speaking in terms of distance, whereas furthest is more abstract. A poster on this forum gives the following example: The further [quantity] you walk, the farther [distance] you get. What gives?.

Ex Output:
The NOAD I had on my Mac Mini reported the following note, which is the same note found on the Oxford Living Dictionaries about farther and farthest. Traditionally, farther and farthest were used in referring to physical distance: the falls were still two or three miles farther up the path. Further and furthest were restricted to figurative or abstract senses: we decided to consider the matter further. Although farther and farthest are still restricted to measurable distances, further and furthest are now common in both senses: put those plants the furthest from the window.


Ex Input:
I am referring to someone who makes people 'buy' what he says and gets things done by them through nothing but clever speech something one can describe as crafty or beguiling, but not fraudulent. I pondered over con man and con artist for a while but those terms seem to hold a hint of crime, so those terms won't fit in. I am wondering if there is a more suitable phrase or word.

Ex Output:

Sophistry is crafty speech intended to deceive, not necessarily out and out lying. So then a sophist is someone who does it. This is mostly just to win arguments though, not necessarily to get people to do things. That would be a demagogue, but that is someone, yes, who is clever with words but in a very specific way, appealing to the listener's baser instincts.