Serious thread only. No fun.

[Thrembologist]

Seriousness is a word that conveys deep meaning. The root word, serious, comes from the Latin "sērius", of similar meaning. Going back further, it evolved from the Proto-Indo-European word *swēr-, meaning "heavy". It was introduced to English, as most romantic words are, through French. The Old French word "serieux" eventually became the Middle English "seryows", and a thousand years later we have the word "serious". Through this etymology it is clear to see how abstract, emotional words typically come from a word describing a physical attribute of something. In this case, for the word serious, we have the word "heavy", which does indeed seem to fit "serious". On the other hand, the word "fun" is a very general word. Of course, being as short as it is, one would be quick to assert that it is of Germanic origin. Indeed, we see cognates of the word "fun" in many different Germanic languages. Swedish has "fånig" , "fåne", and Norweigian has "fomme" and "fume". In Middle English, we see "fonne" or "fon". However, these words do not have the same meaning as the word they would eventually evolve into. They meaning something like "foolish" or "silly", with "fonne" also referring to a fool in general. There is also the word "fonnen", a verb meaning "to make a fool [of someone]" which seems to have no modern equivelent. The Swedish and Norweigian cognates retain the meaning of "foolish", while in English the word has morphed into an entirely different meaning. The modern English meaning comes from the 1700's meaning: "a trick/hoax". A little later in 1720, "fun" gained the meaning of "diversion/amusement". This meaning of the word is preserved in the phrase "make fun of". It was not until the mid 1800's that "fun" gained its ultimate, modern meaning. Where "fun" and all of its cognates originate from, however, is not known for certain. More on the word *swēr-, the origin of "serious", is that it is also related to the word "swear". While "swear" in English only connotates a swear word, in other Germanic languges it retains it's root meaning of "heavy" (see: Dutch "zwaar", German "schwer", and Swedish "svår"). These other languages have also gained a different meaning of "difficulty" or "severe". Comparing the etymologies of these two words makes it very obvious that "serious" is the superior word. It comes from a language of much greater intellectual value. Latin, being used in the entire middle ages and renaissance as the de facto language of academia, carries with it still the reverence of intellect. Latin is used everywhere in science: species' names, anatomical structures, astronomical objects, etc. While English, and Germanic languages as a whole, are reserved more to vernacular. If there should, indeed, be a word to be the 'smarter' of the two, it would be "serious".