False etymology Totally Explained

Everything about False Etymology totally explained

A 'false” or “folk” 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 simply that folk etymologies are widely believed to be true, and of anonymous origin. "Folk etymology" or "popular etymology" is an established term for a false etymology which 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"; "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."

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 Some are simply outdated.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scholars in the early modern period began to produce more reliable results, but many of their hypotheses have been superseded. Even today, knowledge in the field advances so rapidly that many of the etymologies in contemporary dictionaries are outdated.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 (for example 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, for example Volksetymologie itself in Dutch, Afrikaans Volksetimologie, Danish Folkeetymologi, Swedish Folketymologi, and full parallels in non-Germanic languages, for example 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's 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). The same idiom exists in other cultures – in Finland as "nyrkkisääntö" and in German-speaking countries as "Faustregal"; 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, buck, and 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.
   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's 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.

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 Spanish isla). 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 ("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's derived from Greek ανθος (flower). In fact it's a Roman family name, probably meaning something like "ancient".

Further examples

See the following articles that discuss folk etymologies for their subjects:

belfry (architecture)

chav

gringo

sic

sincere

Welsh rarebit

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's derived from sapere (to be wise).
   The spelling of the English word reflects a belief that it's 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's 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, 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.

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's 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's typically resistance to it on the part of those who see through the confusion, but there's 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 the course of 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.

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