From Season Devereux this morning, this excellent image on Threads, from the poster linguisticdiscovery:
Two flying entities, the helicopter and the pterodactyl, are about to hybridize, to merge into a single thing, which will then obviously be denoted by the portmanteau helicopterodactyl — Is it a plane? (not exactly, though it’s a kind of aircraft) Is it a bird? (not exactly, though it has wings) It’s Superfly!
The poster, however, was interested not in hybridization, but in the etymology of helicopter. Their comment:
PSA: The pter in pterodactyl is the same pter in helicopter
Yes, that’s right: helicopter is actually helico + pter, not heli + copter
Ancient Greek: hélix ‘something twisted or spiraling’, pterón ‘wing’
And so it is. Though the popular analysis heli + copter isn’t crazy; it’s a result of copter having been created as a clipping of helicopter — shorter is better, and as phonological abbreviations of longer forms, clippings have no reason to respect the etymological boundaries of elements (they aren’t respected in, for instance, robot > bot, alligator > gator, cigar > gar).
Then, once you’ve got the new item copter, it’s available to combine with other words, as in the compound copter patrol (as first element) and a number of compounds with copter as second element:
fire copter / firecopter ‘helicopter used to fight fires’
news copter / newscopter ‘helicopter used to gather footage for tv news’
Rocket Copter — “Rocket Copters launch like rockets and fly like helicopters, producing a dazzling spinning light show with ultra-bright LED lights that are visible night or day” (ad for the toy, here)
November 15, 2024 at 12:08 pm |
This clears up (for me) the use of the word “ornithopter” for a machine that flies using bird-like wings, as I had been unable to figure out how the “c” in”copter” got lost. Now I know it was never there. (A recent usage that comes to mind, with clipping and all, is the designation of small flying machines in “Dune” as ‘thopters.
November 17, 2024 at 7:10 am |
Dune is the only place I can remember seeing “ornithopter” or “‘thopter”.
November 16, 2024 at 1:31 pm |
Another interesting thing about ‘helicopter’ is that it can form portmanteaus from two separate elements: ‘heli-‘, eg helipad, heliski; and ‘-copter’, eg gyrocopter, quadcopter.