\n\n\n\nOkay, so:
\nLatin has this word, sic. Or, if we want to be more diacritically accurate,\u00a0s\u012bc. That shows that the i is long, so it\u2019s pronounced like\u00a0\u201cseek\u201d and not like\u00a0\u201csick.\u201d
\nYou might recognize this word from Latin sayings like\u00a0\u201csic semper tyrannis\u201d or\u00a0\u201csic transit gloria mundi.\u201d You might recognize it as what you put in parentheses when you want to be pass-agg about someone\u2019s mistakes when you\u2019re quoting them:\u00a0\u201cThen he texted me,\u00a0\u2018I want to touch you\u2019re (sic) butt.\u2019\u201d
\nIt means,\u00a0\u201cthus,\u201d which sounds pretty hoity-toity in this modren era, so maybe think of it as meaning\u00a0\u201cin this way,\u201d or\u00a0\u201cjust like that.\u201d As in,\u00a0\u201cjust like that, to all tyrants, forever,\u201d an allegedly cool thing to say after shooting a President and leaping off a balcony and shattering your leg.\u00a0\u201cEveryone should do it this way.\u201d
\nAnyway, Classical Latin somewhat lacked an affirmative particle, though you might see the word ita, a synonym of sic, used in that way. By Medieval Times, however, sic was holding down this role. Which is to say, it came to mean yes.
\n\n\nEgo: Num edisti totam pitam?
\nTu, pudendus: Sic.
\nMe: Did you eat all the pizza?
\nYou, shameful: That\u2019s the way it is./Yes.
\nThis was pretty well established by the time Latin evolved into its various bastard children, the Romance languages, and you can see this by the words for yes in these languages.
\nIn Spanish, Italian, Asturian, Catalan, Corsican, Galician, Friulian, and others, you say si for yes. In Portugese, you say sim. In French, you say si to mean yes when you\u2019re contradicting a negative assertion (\u201dYou don\u2019t like donkey sausage like all of us, the inhabitants of France, eat all the time?\u201d\u00a0\u201cYes, I do!\u201d). In Romanian, you say da, but that\u2019s because they\u2019re on some Slavic shit. P.S. there are possibly more Romance languages than you\u2019re aware of.
\nBut:
\nThere was still influence in some areas by the conquered Gaulish tribes on the language of their conquerors. We don\u2019t really have anything of Gaulish language left, but we can reverse engineer some things from their descendants. You see, the Celts that we think of now as the people of the British Isles were Gaulish, originally (in the sense that anyone\u2019s originally from anywhere, I guess) from central and western Europe. So we can look at, for example, Old Irish, where they said t\u00f3 to mean yes, or Welsh, where they say do to mean yes or indeed, and we can see that they derive from the Proto-Indo-European (the big mother language at whose teat very many languages both modern and ancient did suckle) word *tod, meaning\u00a0\u201cthis\u201d or\u00a0\u201cthat.\u201d (The asterisk indicates that this is a reconstructed word and we don\u2019t know exactly what it would have been but we have a pretty damn good idea.)
\nSo if you were fucking Ambiorix or whoever and Quintus Titurius Sabinus was like,\u00a0\u201cYo, did you eat all the pizza?\u201d you would do that Drake smile and point thing under your big beefy Gaulish mustache and say,\u00a0\u201cThis.\u201d Then you would have him surrounded and killed.
\nApparently Latin(ish) speakers in the area thought this was a very dope way of expressing themselves.\u00a0\u201cWhy should I say\u00a0\u2018in that way\u2019 like those idiots in Italy and Spain when I could say\u00a0\u2018this\u2019 like all these cool mustache boys in Gaul?\u201d So they started copying the expression, but in their own language. (That\u2019s called a calque, by the way. When you borrow an expression from another language but translate it into your own. If you care about that kind of shit.)
\nThe Latin word for\u00a0\u201cthis\u201d is\u00a0\u201choc,\u201d so a bunch of people started saying\u00a0\u201choc\u201d to mean yes. In the southern parts of what was once Gaul,\u00a0\u201choc\u201d makes the relatively minor adjustment to\u00a0\u00f2c, while in the more northerly areas they think,\u00a0\u201cHmm, just saying\u00a0\u2018this\u2019 isn\u2019t cool enough. What if we said\u00a0\u2018this that\u2019 to mean\u00a0\u2018yes.\u2019\u201d (This is not exactly what happened but it is basically what happened, please just fucking roll with it, this shit is long enough already.)
\nSo they combined hoc with ille, which means \u201cthat\u201d (but also comes to just mean\u00a0\u201che\u201d: compare Spanish el, Italian il, French le, and so on) to make o-il, which becomes\u00a0o\u00efl. This difference between the north and south (i.e. saying oc or oil) comes to be so emblematic of the differences between the two languages/dialects that the languages from the north are called langues d\u2019oil and the ones from the south are called langues d\u2019oc. In fact, the latter language is now officially called\u00a0\u201cOccitan,\u201d which is a made-up word (to a slightly greater degree than that to which all words are made-up words) that basically means\u00a0\u201cOc-ish.\u201d They speak Occitan in southern France and Catalonia and Monaco and some other places.
\nThe oil languages include a pretty beefy number of languages and dialects with some pretty amazing names like Walloon, and also one with a much more basic name: French. Perhaps you\u2019ve heard of it,\u00a0n'est-ce pas?
\nYeah, eventually Francophones drop the -l from oil and start saying it as oui. If you\u2019ve ever wondered why French yes is different from other Romance yeses, well, now you know.
\nI guess what I\u2019m getting at is that when you reblog a post you like and tag it with\u00a0\u201cthis,\u201d or affirm a thing a friend said by nodding and saying\u00a0\u201cYeah, that\u201d: you\u2019re not new
\nthis is all amazing, but I\u2019m now waiting for people to start reblogging posts with the additional comment\u00a0\u201cSIC\u201d.
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