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Patrick Stott's avatar

One of my favourite etymologies was that the words "algebra" and "gibberish" came from the same Arabic root of "al-jabr" - "the reunion of broken parts". To anyone who ever struggled with algebra, that seemed completely obvious.

Turns out it wasn't true. I researched it recently, and while that's all correct for the origin of algebra, the origin of gibberish is uncertain, but it's not that.

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