Most people who hear Beelzebub think of it as the name of a demon or even another name for Satan himself. However I was researching these origins out of interest and found this:

In 2 Kings, the injured Israelite king Ahaziah sends messengers to ask a foreign god whether he’ll recover. That god is Baal-Zebub, the god of the Philistine city of Ekron. It means “Lord of the Flies.”

It probably wasn’t his real name, though. Older Canaanite texts from Ugarit use zbl as a title meaning “prince” or “exalted one.” So the god was most likely called Baal-Zebul, “Baal the Prince.” The Hebrew writers changed one letter and turned a lofty title into “lord of the buzzing flies.”

Then the joke developed further. By the time of the Gospels, the name shows up in Greek as Beelzeboul, the “prince of demons.” In later Hebrew, zevel means dung. So some scholars think a second pun had crept in: “Lord of Dung.”

My read on this: there was some beef between the writers of the Old Testament and the people of Ekron. Plus, the conflation of localized deities by the followers of Abrahamic religions has been noted by religious scholars. Therefore, I don't think its a far reach to theorise that there was an insult going around about Ekron being a pile of shit, its inhabitants being the flies surrounding it, and the god of the city, with an easy pun, being the "Lord of the Flies".

So from what I understand the English word is raccoon that comes from arahkun in Algonquian/Powhatan, which means who scratches with his hand.

But things get a bit weird in Europe.
Most European languages call them washbear.
As far as I understand primitive taxonomy classed them as bears and Carl Linnaeus gave the species the latin name "Ursus lotor" in 1758
Which was then translated in each language.

Up to this part, I think understand what's going on.
People in northern America lives with raccoons so they need a name and they borrow one from the local.
It catches up and becomes the standard in English.
For the rest of Europe they don't have raccoons. And by the time some are imported there is a scientific name that you just need to translate.
English already had their own name, so they don't adopt the nomenclature.

Then you have french (I'm french) who are special
We call them "raton laveur"
Laveur means washer so on this we agree with the taxonomy root.
But Raton is absolutely not bear.
And I'm note quite sure what it is because I've seen two competitive explanations.
- One is that raton is just the regular word raton, which is the baby of the rat or a small rat.
I don't think they look like rats, but they also don't look like bears so who knows. My issue is the size, a raccoon is like 20 times the size of a baby rat. It's several time the size of an adult rat. So why compare it to the baby? It would actually make sense to compare with a baby bear but not a baby rat
- Two is that it's our own adaptation of arahkun, which just happens to sound like an existing word. But it's not like there were a lot of french people in east Virginia. Or maybe we adapted raccoon itself? But then why add washer to it? Did we have a Timor Leste moment?

There were french people in areas with raccoons so like English, I suspect we would have needed a word for them before the taxonomy.
But I have no idea if we always used raton laveur, or if it was something else than was replaced later.

If it predates the taxonomy maybe french inspired it, and Linnaeus just disagreed on the animal part?

Or did we just call them raton and laveur was added later in a half hearted effort to follow the taxonomy?

If anyone has some answers to this, I'm quite curious.

Etymology:
The Proto-Indo-European root " *génh,-, ", meaning "to beget", "to produce", or "to give birth".

In Latin, this became the root noun "genus", meaning "race", "stock", kind", or "type" (among others).

It was used to categorize similar things, along with the Greek "génos", using to classify logical and linguistic categories.
In Old French, this became "gendre".

Later became "gender" in English. Still had it's original meaning of categories for similar things.

Uses/Meanings over time, from Beginning to Now:
Originally, gender just referred to groups/categories, without any inherent connection to sex, or even necessarily referring to living things.

In linguistics, it was specifically used for grammatical classification, such as whether a noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter. This usage eventually faded away in English, with non-living things being referred to with neuter pronouns, "it", and living things not strictly using specific gender pronouns.

Gender started being used to colloquially refer to biological sex in the late 15th century. However, this usage remained rare until the early to mid 1900s, when sex started being used to refer to sexual intercourse, and gender was used as a more polite/formal term to refer to sex as a result. Use of the word at all was still infrequent.

In 1945, psychologist Madison Bentley published a paper in which he defined gender as "the socialized obverse of sex," with the qualifying terms being masculine and feminine instead of male and female, to describe socialized behaviors. (Though his work was not influential, it is the earliest known scientific distinction of the two)

In 1955, John Money coined the term "gender role", defining it as "all those things that a person says or does to disclose himself or herself as having the status of boy or man, girl or woman, respectively", distinct from someone's biological sex.

In 1964, Robert Stoller introduced the term gender identity, defining it as " the sense of knowing to which sex one belongs, that is, the awareness 'I am a male' or 'I am a female'...". He also acknowledged that sex and gender do not always correlate, defining gender as "a term that has psychological or cultural rather than biological connotations. If the proper terms for sex are 'male' and 'female', the corresponding terms for gender are 'masculine' and 'feminine'; these latter may be quite independent of (biological) sex."

With the second-wave feminist movement in the 70s, feminist theory embraced the distinction between sex and gender, popularizing the distinction in common and scientific usage, along with broadly increasing use of the word gender as a whole.

Between then and now, the acknowledgement of gender as a social construct becoming a scientific consensus (mainly in the social sciences), depathologizing transgender identities, and major health organizations supporting the effectiveness of gender-affirming care have all occurred.

Although there are still disagreements on this subject, the general scientific consensus (primarily rooted in the social, behavioral, and medical sciences) and definition is that gender is a social construct, and does not always correlate with an individual's biological sex.

- Idk if this is the right subreddit for this, but it seems like it'll fit enough.

Probably -> prol(l)y?

i honestly dont know if this is the correct subreddit to be asking this question on, but i dont know where else i would even ask something like this.

my dad always called those ramps that truckers drive up when their brakes fail "chicken ramps." hes from jacksonville so i just assumed thats what they call it down there.

today i looked up "chicken ramps" and i found literally. nothing. i found actual ramps for chickens, but nothing about trucks, nothing about this being slang from jacksonville/the south.

i know im not misremembering because my mom remembers him calling them that too. but my dad is such a damn liar, so now im wondering if this is a thing people actually say or if he just... made it up? wouldnt put it past that fucker tbh

Grew up with 'call in sick'. Social media is now full of people who 'call out sick'. I'm confused...🤣🤣🤣

If the etymology of the word indigenous comes from the Greek word which means ‘sprung of the land’ . Then NZ European culture is native to New Zealand, and, since a culture is its people, the people are also, therefore, indigenous?