False etymology

A false etymology is an assumed or postulated etymology that current consensus among scholars of historical linguistics holds to be incorrect. Many false etymologies may be described as "folk etymologies", the distinction being that folk etymologies are widely believed to be true, and of anonymous origin.

"Folk etymology" or "popular etymology" are established terms for a false etymology that grows up anonymously in popular lore. A modern folk etymology may be thought of as a linguistic urban legend, but folk etymologies can be very old and even establish themselves as accepted fact among scholars.

The term may be used in two distinct ways:

* A commonly held misunderstanding of the origin of a particular word, a false etymology.
* "The popular perversion of the form of words in order to render it apparently significant"; ["OED", second edition, 1989.] "the process by which a word or phrase, usually one of seemingly opaque formation, is arbitrarily reshaped so as to yield a form which is considered to be more transparent." [R.L. Trask (1996). "A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology". London; New York: Routledge.]

Erroneous etymologies can exist for many reasons. Some are simply outdated. For a given word there may often have been many serious attempts by scholars to propose etymologies based on the best information available at the time, and these can be later modified or rejected as linguistic scholarship advances. The results of medieval etymology, for example, were plausible given the insights available at the time, but have mostly been rejected by modern linguists. The etymologies of humanist scholars in the early modern period began to produce more reliable results, but many of their hypotheses have been superseded. Even today, knowledge in the field advances so rapidly that many of the etymologies in contemporary dictionaries are outdated.

False etymologies are a consequence of the longstanding interest in putatively original, and therefore normative, meanings of words, a characteristic of logocentrism. Until academic linguistics developed the comparative study of philology and the development of the laws underlying sound changes, the derivation of words was a matter mostly of guess-work, sometimes right but more often wrong, based on superficial resemblances of form and the like. This popular etymology has had a powerful influence on the forms which words take (e.g., "crawfish" or "crayfish", from the French "crevis", modern crevisse, and has frequently been the occasion of homonyms resulting from different etymologies for what appears a single word, with the original meaning(s) reflecting the true etymology and the new meaning(s) reflecting the 'incorrect' popular etymology.

The term "folk etymology", as referring both to erroneous beliefs about derivation and the consequent changes to words, is derived from the German "Volksetymologie". Similar terms are found in other languages, e.g., "Volksetymologie" itself in Dutch, Afrikaans "Volksetimologie", Danish "Folkeetymologi", Swedish "Folketymologi", and full parallels in non-Germanic languages, e.g. French "étymologie populaire", Hungarian "népetimológia"; an example of an alternative name is Italian "pseudoetimologia".

Folk etymology becomes especially interesting when it feeds back into the development of the word and thus becomes a part of the true etymology. Because a population wrongly believes a word to have a certain origin, they begin to pronounce or use the word in a manner appropriate to that perceived origin, in a kind of misplaced pedantry. Thus a new standard form of the word appears which has been influenced by the misconception. In such cases it is often said that the form of the word has been "altered by folk etymology". (Less commonly, but found in the etymological sections of the OED, one might read that the word was altered by pseudo-etymology, or false etymology.) Pyles and Algeo give the example of "chester drawers" for "chest of drawers"; similarly, "chase lounge" for "chaise longue".

Some etymologies are part of urban legends, and seem to respond to a general taste for the surprising, counterintuitive and even scandalous. One common example has to do with the phrase "rule of thumb", meaning a rough measurement. An urban legend has it that the phrase refers to an old English law under which a man could legally beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb (though no such law ever existed). [ [http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-rul1.htm World Wide Words etymology of "rule of thumb"] ] The same idiom exists in other cultures – in Finland as "nyrkkisääntö" and in German-speaking countries as "Faustregel"; both mean "rule of fist".

In the United States, many of these scandalous legends have had to do with racism and slavery. Common words such as "picnic", [ [http://www.snopes.com/language/offense/picnic.htm Urban Legends reference pages on supposed etymology of picnic] ] "buck", [ [http://www.snopes.com/language/offense/buck.htm Urban Legends reference pages on supposed etymology of buck] ] and "crowbar" [ [http://www.snopes.com/language/offense/crowbar.asp Urban Legends reference pages on supposed origin of crowbar] ] have been alleged to stem from derogatory terms or racist practices. The "discovery" of these alleged etymologies is often believed by those who circulate them to draw attention to racist attitudes embedded in ordinary discourse. On one occasion, the use of the word "niggardly" led to the resignation of a U.S. public official because it sounded similar to the word "nigger", despite the two words being unrelated etymologically. [ [http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mniggard.html Article on the etymology of the word niggardly] ]

Another false etymology claims that the term "cracker" dates back to slavery in the antebellum South. This is based on tales of overseers using bullwhips to discipline African slaves, with the sound of the whip described as "cracking". However, there is no evidence of this usage prior to the 20th-century, suggesting this is a neologism created through cultural assumptions. The term actually has much older origins in the British Isles, based on a term for braggarts. [ [http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/site/comments/cracker/ Etymology of the word cracker] ] [ [http://chancellorfiles.com/blog1/2007/01/16/cracker-the-white-man-with-the-whip/1/ Article on false etymology of the word cracker] ]

Examples of words modified by folk etymology

*Old English ' ("bride-man") became ' after the Old English word "" fell out of use and made the compound semantically obscure.
*The silent "s" in ' is a result of folk etymology. This native Anglo-Saxon word, at one time spelled "iland", derives from an Old English compound of "īeg" or "īg" + "land", but was erroneously believed to be related to "", which had come to English via Old French from Latin ' ("island"; cf. Modern Italian "isola"). Old English "īeg", "īg" derives from Germanic *"aujō" = "object on the water", from earlier Germanic *"agwjō", and is akin to Old English "ēa" = "water", "river", from prehistoric Germanic *"ahwō". Hence through *"ahwō", ' is related, not to Latin ', but rather to Latin "" ("water"). (For a use of "ēa", see Eton, Berkshire, Origin of the Name.).

More recent examples:
*', which in England became '.
*' became ' or ' when the original meaning of ' ("four") had become obsolete.

Other changes due to folk etymology include:
*' from ' (originally a loop of string that held a button down)
*"Charterhouse" from Chartreuse, the feminine of "Chartreux"
*' from '
*' from '
*' from ' ("caught in shame")
*' from ' ("long chair")
*' from ' (as old lanterns were glazed with strips of cows' horn)
*A "slug" of liquor from the Irish word "slog", meaning to swallow

When a back-formation rests on a misunderstanding of the morphology of the original word, it may be regarded as a kind of folk etymology.

In heraldry, a rebus coat-of-arms (which expresses a name by one or more elements only significant by virtue of the supposed etymology) may reinforce a folk etymology for a noun proper, usually of a place.

The same process sometimes influences the spelling of proper names. The name "Antony"/"Anthony" is often spelled with an "h" because of the Elizabethan belief that it is derived from Greek ανθος (flower). In fact it is a Roman family name, probably meaning something like "ancient".

Acceptability of resulting forms

The question of whether the resulting usage is "correct" or "incorrect" depends on one's notion of correctness; at any rate it is a separate issue from the question of whether the assumed etymology is correct. When a confused understanding of etymology produces a new form today, there is typically resistance to it on the part of those who see through the confusion, but there is no question of long-established words being considered wrong because folk etymology has affected them. "Chaise lounge" and "Welsh rarebit" are disparaged by many, but "shamefaced" and "buttonhole" are universally accepted. See prescription and description.

Influence on spelling

Over time, many words have been altered in order to better reflect false Latin or Greek etymologies. "Island" (previously "iland") and "ptarmigan" (previously "tarmigan") are two such words. See English spelling reform—successes in spelling complication.

Other languages

The French verb "savoir" (to know) was formerly spelled "sçavoir", in order to link it with the Latin "scire" (to know). In fact it is derived from "sapere" (to be wise).

The spelling of the English word "" reflects a belief that it is derived from Latin "post humum", literally "after the earth", in other words after burial. In fact the Latin "postumus" is an old superlative of "post" (after), formed in the same way as "optimus" and "ultimus".

The spelling of the English word "lethal" reflects a belief that it is derived from Lethe, the river in the mythological kingdom of the dead. In fact it comes from the unconnected Latin word "letum", meaning death.

In British English, aubergines are sometimes called "mad apples". The Italian word for the aubergine is "melanzana", which was misheard as "mela insana".

Medieval Latin has a word, "bachelarius" (bachelor), of uncertain origin, referring to a junior knight, and by extension to the holder of a University degree inferior to Master or Doctor. This was later re-spelled "baccalaureus" to reflect a false derivation from "bacca laurea" (laurel berry), alluding to the possible laurel crown of a poet or conqueror.

"Olisipona" (Lisbon) was explained as deriving from the city's supposed foundation by Ulysses (Odysseus), though the settlement certainly antedates any Greek presence.

In Southern Italy in the Greek period there was a city "Maloeis" (gen. "Maloentos"), meaning "fruitful". This was rendered in Latin as "Maleventum", "ill come" or "ill wind", and renamed Beneventum ("well come" or "good wind") after the Roman conquest.

In the Alexandrian period, and in the Renaissance, many (wrongly) explained the name of the god Kronos as being derived from "chronos" (time), and interpreted the myth of his swallowing his children as an allegory meaning that Time consumes all things.

The American Grizzly bear is so named because its hair is ' or silver-tipped, but its name was later mistakenly derived from ' meaning "horrible". This error has been perpetuated in the grizzly bear's scientific trinomial name: "Ursus arctos horribilis".

ee also

*Backronym
*Chinese translation of crisis
*Johannes Goropius Becanus
*Okay
*Pseudoscientific language comparison
*Slang dictionary

Further reading

*"The Origins and Development of the English Language", 4th ed., Thomas Pyles and John Algeo, 1993.
*"Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends" (by David Wilton, Oxford University Press, 2004, ISBN 0195172841)

References

External links

* [http://web.archive.org/web/20070211192642/http://www.wordorigins.org/Topics/errors.html Common errors in popular Etymology (wordorigins.org)] (Internet Archive)
* [http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0203/lederer022003.asp "Spook etymology on the Internet" by Richard Lederer]