the.com/witness
the last honest variable in a story everyone else is busy rewriting
means A witness is someone who saw or experienced something and can speak to what actually happened, or the act of giving such testimony.
from From Old English 'witnes,' built on 'wit' — knowledge, the act of knowing — plus the suffix '-ness.' So a witness is literally one who carries knowing, knowledge made into a person. The same 'wit' root runs through 'wisdom' and the old phrase 'to wit,' and traces back to a Proto-Germanic stem meaning to know, a distant cousin of Latin 'videre,' to see. Knowing and seeing, tangled together at the root — fitting, since a witness is asked for both.
- memory glitch
- Eyewitness recall reshapes itself every time you remember it
- word origin
- From Old English meaning knowledge, not just seeing
- legal weight
- Wrongful convictions overturned by DNA mostly involved misidentification
- silent kind
- Bystanders can be charged for failing to act
- oldest job
- Babylonian contracts already required named witnesses 4000 years ago
anita hill testimony — testified against clarence thomas in 1991 senate hearing on sexual harassment allegations
monica lewinsky kenneth starr — testified before grand jury about clinton affair in 1998 independent counsel investigation