Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorder_(musical_instrument)#... has a full etymology, which contradicts the article.
The etymology you reference seems speculative, not really contradicting the article's claim that the etymology isn't clear.
There are many, but the word is somewhat amorphous. Personally, I would call almost anything that uses a Helmholtz resonator instigated with the mouth as the initial oscillator a "flute," but will also take it to mean "orchestral flute" based on guessed context in conversation.
The thing that makes clarinets and oboes not flutes is that they have one or more reeds rather than producing a direct Helmholtz resonator.
http://www.colinpykett.org.uk/how_the_flue_pipe_speaks.htm
I think a better definition of a flute is a mouth-blown wind instrument with no vibrating parts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dizi_(instrument)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daegeum
These are uncontroversially flutes, so the definition would have to be "mouth-blown wind instruments that generate a tone without using vibrating parts".
I've always thought that 'boy' sounded suspiciously close to the Swiss German translation "bueb" (or sometimes "buebe"), almost pronounced "b-way-b"
According to Etymology Online[0]:
`boy (n.)
mid-13c., boie "servant, commoner, knave" (generally young and male); c. 1300, "rascal, ruffian, knave; urchin," mid-14c. as "male child before puberty" (possibly extended from the "urchin" sense). A word of unknown origin.
Possibly from Old French embuie "one fettered," from Vulgar Latin imboiare, from Latin boia "leg iron, yoke, leather collar," from Greek boeiai dorai "ox hides." (Words for "boy" double as "servant, attendant" across the Indo-European map — compare Italian ragazzo, French garçon, Greek pais, Middle English knave, Old Church Slavonic otroku — and often it is difficult to say which meaning came first.)
But it also appears to be identical with East Frisian boi "young gentleman," and perhaps with Dutch boef "knave," from Middle Dutch boeve, perhaps from Middle Low German buobe. This suggests a gradational relationship to babe. Another conjecture:
In Old English, only the proper name Boia has been recorded. ME boi meant 'churl, servant' and (rarely) 'devil.' In texts, the meaning 'male child' does not antedate 1400. ModE boy looks like a semantic blend of an onomatopoeic word for an evil spirit ( *boi) and a baby word for 'brother' ( *bo). [Liberman]
Extended form boyo is attested from 1870. Emphatic exclamation oh, boy is attested by 1917. Boy-meets-girl "typical of a conventional romance" is from 1945; the phrase itself is from 1934 as a dramatic formula. Boy-crazy "eager to associate with males" is from 1923.
A noticable number of the modern words for 'boy', 'girl', and 'child' were originally colloquial nicknames, derogatory or whimsical, in part endearing, and finally commonplace. These, as is natural, are of the most diverse, and in part obscure, origin. [Buck]"The reason why is mostly a bootstrapping problem. The purpose of words is communication, and it's a lot easier to adapt an existing word to a new purpose that it is to just invent some new pattern of sounds and convince people to start using it. It's easier now with mass media, but prior to that, nearly impossible.
For every "Zyrtec" (which still plays on "tech") you have "Claritin" ("clear/clarity") and others.
It's hard to find a word that is a truly original coinage not based on any existing words.
I’m thinking of things like “a parliament of owls” or “a murder of crows”.
His voice is quite soothing, and it's interesting enough to constantly hold your attention, while not being _so_ interesting that it keeps you awake, and while it's loosely organized chronologically on an episode-by-episode basis, within each episode it's sort of arranged thematically, so you can dip in and out of consciousness and not be confused as to what he's talking about, and you can pick it up the next night at some random spot and not really feel like you missed much. It also has long stretches where he's just sort of listing off words and etymologies, which are the kinds of trivial facts I love, but I think my brain also takes as a signal to turn off.
Eventually, I gave up. I’m not one of his backers, so he doesn’t owe me anything, but I would have preferred it if he did something more like Dan Carlin (there are plenty of quibbles about his historiography, but you have to admit he’s very good at storytelling), doing deep dives on various subjects instead of beating Middle and early Modern English to death. Yes, they were very important times in the language, where the mostly-comprehensible Middle English turned into the entirely-comprehensible (if you have footnotes for words whose meaning has changed and cultural references that no longer apply) early Modern English, but the language hasn’t been static since 1500.
Another usage is for supervising professors who attend a lecture to "audit" it in the sense that an IRS auditor would audit a tax return. They are examining the junior professor's performance or adherence to guidelines.
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12608-when-i-use-a-word-hum...
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.” ― Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
Have a wonderful day!
However, to OP: a facetious response quoting literature is quite unkind. While you may feel that 'audit' means something particular, the fact is that it has a couple of definitions and none of them are immediately apparent (to me, a native speaker).
It's also quite prone to being used as a 'false friend' for something who speaks romance languages in which the normal verb for 'listen' is close to the Latin.
Bear in mind that this is the internet, and no-one can be sure whether English is anyone's first language. As an external observer, I can't tell if you are a native English speaker, and I cannot tell whether the person asking the question is a native English speaker.
A better way to approach the question would have been just to give the benefit of the doubt and answer simply and clearly.
(BTW: there's some interesting discussion of your point of view here: https://blog.oup.com/2022/11/the-return-of-humpty-dumpty-who...)
Great book!
I find it difficult to believe that we don't have a good word for what 99+% of people are doing since puberty and allows also to express the object of the fantasy using a simple subject+verb+object type of sentence.
Same with words for copulation (highly restricted) and even for wooing / courting, which are also pretty universal activities since times immemorial.
My response to your finding it difficult to believe is: you're asking for a word for an intensely private act! Think about how rarely people overtly and bluntly say they are sexually fantasizing about someone. When it's actually admitted to, it's done using a variety of metaphors, slang and indirect hints.
And in general, we don't have a commonly used prefix or second compounded word to turn a physical act into a fantasy. Even though "fuck" predates Early Modern there was nothing commonly attached to it to make it mental.
If you really want a single verb, "lust."
For sexual fantasies about somebody one's looking at, "undressing with one's eyes."
Auto-tagging/making clickable certain proper nouns like Homelander could be neat if there’s a way to detect them.
Metaphor is also common in this area where direct description many be impolite. A person can be smitten or enchanted by someone. Or they can carry a candle.
Lots of modern variations abound. "squished [on]" when more romantically/asexually. Couples (usually strictly monogamous) may allow each other a "hall pass", which is a noun for someone that is an (often unattainable) sexual fantasy. ("He is my hall pass.")
I think languages in general pick up a lot of nuanced terms for these kinds of things, far more than just a single transitive verb. Especially because things like sexual interest are often "forbidden" from discussion in "polite society", so a lot of it starts as euphemisms or analogies and maybe never leaves. "Hall pass" is a euphemism from childhood school days that seems to have stuck for a very specific niche.
You can find a lot of variation in places like Urban Dictionary. It can be fun to try to find old slang dictionaries from previous eras to see how much things have shifted over time. (Euphemisms tend to, especially as jobs or technologies shift out from whatever is being euphemized.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/8qdnpu/what_are_...
Or more generally from uralic languages, example Finnish: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/poika
ボーイ: Borrowed from English boy