Karl Fogel at
I think of myself as someone who's good at English spelling. But then yesterday I discovered that a supposedly familiar word is originally spelled "impostor" and that "imposter" is a recent variant...
...ah, I think you can all finish the rest of this joke yourselves!
heh :-)
that got me wondering whether 'impost' exists as a verb in English. I can't imagine what 'imposter' would derive form otherwise. turns out impost is only a noun, and impose is the verb, but impost[oe]r carries not only the sense of imposition that associates it with impose, but also that of false pretenses. AFAIK only the latter meaning survived in pt and es; I was surprised by the non-fraudulent sense it can have in English. I wonder whether it is etymological or accidental.
FSFLA has had this campaign against imposed tax software, a lossy translation of the "softwares impostos" pun: impostos is plural for both imposed and tax, and we chose plural because somehow the pun didn't seem to work in the singular form. I might have suggested "imposed impost software" for the English translation, had I known the word "impost" back then :-)
Alexandre Oliva at 2021-06-25T02:19:34Z
Karl Fogel likes this.