Anyone up for a nerdy etymology thread?

Too bad, here we go:

The word “landscape”...

Middle Dutch: landscap = region, from land + scap = -ship/-ness/condition (so, basically, landship)

17th c Dutch: landschap

From there in comes into English JUST as an art term

1/

It stays in the art world till the 1880s, when it’s used for actual land (“staring out the window at the landscape”) and then by 1916 it’s a verb (“Martha can’t even landscape, would you look at those peonies”)

/2

But meanwhile, back in the late 1700s, the -scape part is starting to peel off, getting used in “prisonscape” (meaning a view of a prison, not an escape from one)

/3

And then we get moonscape, hellscape, etc., with the “scape” part obviously having come to mean, for most people, “view” rather than what it really means, which is -ship.

/4

So we just peeled this suffix off, subconsciously etymologized it, and then started riffing on it freely. I just kind of love this.

But meanwhile, “escape” has nothing to do with this.

Latin
Ex = out of
Cappa = hood

Meaning, essentially, that things escape you by sneaking by in a hood.

/6

Anyway: This thread brought to you by a “Welcome to your escape” casino billboard that I misread as “hellscape,” and also, therefore, by the year 2020.