A miser is someone who is infatuated with the past, and is grumpy about the present, (compared to depressive, or someone who is infatuated with the future, and depressed about the present), so when did it come to mean someone who is a cheapskate and stingy over money?
When looking at the natural evolution of languages (use turns to convention turns to rules), one must remember that the misers that were poor probably didn’t survive, procreate, and thrive as much as those who did.
Social darwinism, man. Assholes proliferate 🤷
it feels like the English language has become simpler in vocabulary, like Chinese language, since 2017