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On Tuesday, April 30, 2002 11:05 pm, Adam Walker wrote: > Yeah, I think this is definitely what C-o is going to do. Yeah, I like the > "linda" ambiguity. It could make for some nice poetic twists since linda > *could* be the word for beautiful in C-o, too. Where does linda come from? > Beautiful seems to come from a lot of different sources in Romance. Lindo comes ultimately from Latin LEGITIMU- (accent on the antepenult). Phonologically, the development was like this: legitimu > leidmo/lidmo > limdo > lindo. Semantically, I'm not absolutely sure I remember this correctly, but I think the word in its feminine forms came to be used of upper-class ladies, deriving from its sense of "proper." From there it eventually lost both its class distinction and its emphasis on propriety and shifted to mean simply pretty or beautiful.