Your comment prompted me to go read about epicenters and I learned something new. The hypocenter of an earthquake is apparently the point of origin of the earthquake and the epicenter is the point on the earth's surface directly above the hypocenter. Had never heard of a hypocenter before.

▲

rpozarickij 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I didn't know about hypocenter before too but it's neat how you can sometimes deduce the meaning of a word from its parts (because "hypo" means "under"/"below" in Greek, like in hypodermic, hypoglycaemia, etc).

▲

macintux 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The class wasn't as interesting as I'd hoped, in part because it seemed to attract older kids hoping for an easy grade, but in my high school we had an etymology class.

(My school also offered Latin, but etymology seemed a much more direct/easier way to get the same basics. I just wish someone had taught me about demographics so I would have taken Spanish instead of German.)

	▲	waldothedog 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But how much did they teach you about insects?

▲

Aachen 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Basically every language works that way? You can say underquake in English if you like, doesn't have to be Greek. In fact, it might make sense to pick a widely understood language rather than one with ~13 million speakers

	▲	shiroiuma 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"Hypocenter", like "epicenter", is English, not Greek. These words, like many words in English today, are made of Greek components, which is why kids are taught in grade school English class about Latin and Greek roots. No, not every language works this way, because not every language uses Latin and Greek root-words like this.

▲

LadyCailin 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Interestingly, I learned the word hypocenter in Japan as well, in a much more sobering way. The atom bomb that hit Hiroshima exploded above the ground, and the building directly under that, where the blast would have hit first, is called the hypocenter.