Silly little language question
4 posts, 3 voices
Rick Murray (539)
13850 posts
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We have terrorists and we have horror movies. We don’t have terror movies (though some companies have tried gimmicks with names like Terrorvision1) and we certainly don’t talk about horrorists. Thus my question: what’s the difference between “terror” and “horror”? Cue Gavin… ;-) 1 Party political broadcasts, these days. |
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Rick Murray (539)
13850 posts
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While we’re here – Twilight vs Dusk? Both words for that bit in between sundown and dark? |
George T. Greenfield (154)
749 posts
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Horror vs. Terror: if your dog deposits a large turd on my new carpet I may be horrified, but probably not terrified: the latter involves a perceived (personal) risk. |
GavinWraith (26)
1563 posts
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I don’t know why we don’t have horrorist . Perhaps we could say that Alfred Hitchcock was a horrorist? The two words horror and terror are very similar in their derivations. Latin horrere means to bristle, to shake, and terrere means to frighten . Permit me to quote a line of Ennius, the Edward Lear of the second century BC who loved to play with words and alliteration. Africa, a land with its hair on end, trembles at a terrible tumult . Remember that double r should have double the length of a single, and here we have three of them. It is a symphony of t -s, r -s and rr -s. Alas, uninflected languages like English cannot play this game of splitting up and interweaving phrases like terribili tumultu and Africa horrida terra; though Anglo-Saxon could and did. |
