2020-09-30 ศัพท์ ที่มักสับสน ชุด F – Focus & nexus

Revision F

2020-09-30

151209-1 ศัพท์ ที่มักสับสน ชุด F – Focus & nexus

การใช้ภาษาอังกฤษ ที่ถือว่า ถูกต้อง ในที่นี้ เป็นไป ตามมาตรฐาน ของภาษา

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ความหมาย อาจยืดหยุ่น ขึ้นอยู่กับ ตำแหน่ง/หน้าที่ ในประโยค

Dictionary.com

ออกเสียง “Focus” = ‘FOH-kuhs’

ออกเสียง “Nexus” = ‘NEK-suhs’

Dictionary.com
BEHIND THE WORD

Where does focus come from?

What does the word focus bring to your mind?

Maybe you think of a photograph that is clear and sharply defined.

Or perhaps you recall a teacher tsk-tsking you to pay attention in class.

Well, the word focus comes directly from the Latin focus, which meant “fireplace” or “hearth” (that is, the floor of a fireplace). This is what focus originally meant in English when the word entered the language around 1635–45, though that sense has been extinguished, as it were.

But the word focus burned on in other ways. As the 1600s unfolded, focus was given new meanings in the great scientific literature of that age, which were largely written in what’s known as New Latin. In the 1650s, the influential English philosopher and author Thomas Hobbes used focus for a kind of fixed point in geometry. So did Isaac Newton—you know, of gravity fame—in the 1690s.

Other applicationsof the word focus in the late 1600s came about in the fields of medicine and physics. In physics, a focus is“a point at which rays of light, heat, or other radiation meet after being refracted or reflected.” Perhaps you can imagine how a fireplace or a hearth—contained areas and sources of heat and light—was likened to such a point in math and science.

Dig deeper

The word focus took on a number of senses in optics, specifically “the point on a lens on which rays converge or from which they deviate.” A more familiar sense of focus is “the clear and sharply defined condition of an image,” as when the image isn’t blurry. Optics has also given us the expressions in focus and out of focus, which can be used both literally and figuratively.

From these various ideas of clarity and convergence in optics arises one of the more common, everyday ways we use the word focus today: “a central point, as a of attention, activity, or activity.”

For example, Finding a cure for cancer was the focus of his long career.

Focus also refers to ability to concentrate, as in The teacher felt the students struggled with their focus.

These sensesof focus had spread by the early 1800s, around when various verb forms of focus take off. The adjective form of focus is focal.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Did You Know?

The Latin word focus meant “hearth, fireplace.”

In the scientific Latin of the 17th century, the word is used to refer to the point at which rays of light refracted by a lens converge.

Because rays of sunlight when directed by a magnifying glass can produce enough heat to ignite paper, a word meaning “fireplace” is quite appropriate as a metaphor to describe their convergence point. From this sense of focus have arisen extended senses such as “center of activity.”