If the opposite of con is pro then is the opposite of congress, progress? Or did I just blow your fucking mind?
I know this is supposed to be clever and witty and whatever. It is not anything more than etymologically ignorant.
Pros and cons is a modern abbreviation for the latin pro et contra, meaning “for and against.” While the prefix pro- bears the same meaning, contra- is not the same as the prefix con-, which means “with.” The root or suffix of the word, gress, means “to go,” so these words literally mean “to go forward” and “to go together.” Clearly, these two words are not opposites.
So there… your Latin lesson for the day.
Related story: A few years ago, my team inherited a service that handled file uploads via form POSTs. It signalled errors to the frontend using two urls that were passed in with the upload: progress and congress. If an upload was processed correctly, the browser would be redirected the url passed in via the “progress” parameter, and failures were redirected to the url from the “congress” parameter.
My teammate knew the etymology was all wrong, and as a result absolutely HATED these names (years later, he still teases the author of that code about it). When we finally replaced the upload handling code, these params were renamed to successRedirect and failureRedirect…. though I’m pretty sure we still accept congress/progress for backwards compatibility.
1 year ago