My master's degree is in historical linguistics, and one of the first things I learned was that it's tricky to tell if two words are related.
Languages are full of false cognates, pairs of words that look alike but have different etymologies -- in other words, their similarities are coincidental. Take the words police and (insurance) policy. Look like they should be related, right?
Nope. Police comes from the Latin politia (meaning "civil administration"), which in turn comes from polis, "city." (So it's a cognate to the last part of words like metropolis and cosmopolitan.) Policy -- as it is used in the insurance business -- comes from the Old Italian poliza (a bill or receipt) and back through the Latin apodissa to the Greek ἀπόδειξις (meaning "a written proof or declaration"). To make matters worse, the other definition of policy -- a practice of governance -- comes from politia, so it's related to police but not to the insurance meaning of policy.
Speaking of government -- and another example of how you can't trust what words look like -- you might never guess that the word government and the word cybernetics are cousins. Both of them come from the Greek κυβερνητικός -- a mechanism used to steer a ship.
My own research was about the extent of borrowing between Old Norse, Old English, and Old Gaelic, as a consequence of the Viking invasions of the British Isles that started in the eighth century C.E. The trickiest part was that Old Norse and Old English are themselves related languages; both of them belong to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family. So there are some legitimate cognates there, words that did descend in parallel in both languages. (A simple example is the English day and Norwegian dag.) So how do you tell if a word in English is there because it descended peacefully from its Proto-Germanic roots, or was borrowed from Old Norse-speaking invaders rather late in the game?
It isn't simple. One group I'm fairly sure are Old Norse imports are most of our words that have a hard /g/ sound followed by an /i/ or an /e/, because some time around 700 C.E. the native Old English /gi/ and /ge/ words were palatalized to /yi/ and /ye/. (Two examples are yield and yellow, which come from the Anglo-Saxon gieldan and geolu respectively.) So if we have surviving words with a /gi/ or /ge/ -- gift, get, gill, gig -- they must have come into the language after 700, as they escaped getting palatalized to *yift, *yet, *yill, and *yig. Those words -- and over a hundred more I was able to identify, using similar sorts of arguments -- came directly from Old Norse.
Anyhow, the whole topic comes up because I've been seeing this thing going around on social media headed, "Did You Know...?" with a list of a bunch of words, and the curious and funny origins they supposedly have.
And almost all of them are wrong.
I've refrained from saying anything to the people who posted it, because I don't want to be the "Well, actually..." guy. But it rankled enough that I felt impelled to write a post about it, so this is kind of a broadside "Well, actually...", which I'm not sure is any nicer. But in any case, here are a few of the more egregious "folk etymologies," as these fables are called -- just to set the record straight.
- History doesn't come from "his story," i.e., a deliberate way to tell men's stories and exclude women's. The word's origins have nothing to do with men at all. It comes from the Greek ‘ἱστορία, "inquiry."
- Snob is not a contraction of the Latin sine nobilitate ("without nobility"). It's only attested back to the 1780s and is of unknown origin.
- Marmalade doesn't have its origin with Mary Queen of Scots, who supposedly asked for it when she had a headache, leading her French servants to say "Marie est malade." The word is much older than that, and goes back to the Portuguese marmelada, meaning "quince jelly," and ultimately to the Greek μελίμηλον, "apples preserved in honey."
- Nasty doesn't come from the biting and vitriolic nineteenth-century political cartoonist Thomas Nast. In fact, it predates Nast by several centuries (witness Hobbes's comment about medieval life being "poor, nasty, brutish, and short," which was written in 1651). Nasty probably comes from the Dutch nestig, meaning "dirty."
- Pumpernickel doesn't have anything to do with Napoleon and his alleged horse Nicole who supposedly liked brown bread, leading Napoleon to say that it was "Pain pour Nicole." Its actual etymology is just as weird, though; it comes from the medieval German words pumpern and nickel and translates, more or less, to "devil's farts."
- Crap has very little to do with Thomas Crapper, who perfected the design of the flush toilet, although it certainly sounds like it should (and his name and accomplishment probably repopularized the word's use). Crapper's unfortunate surname comes from cropper, a Middle English word for "farmer." As for crap, it seems to come from Medieval Latin crappa, "chaff," but its origins before that are uncertain.
- Last, but certainly not least, fuck is not an acronym. For anything. It's not from "For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge," whatever Van Halen would have you believe, and those words were not hung around adulterers' necks as they sat in the stocks. It also doesn't stand for "Fornication Under Consent of the King," which comes from the story that in bygone years, when a couple got married, if the king liked the bride's appearance, he could claim the right of "prima nocta" (also called "droit de seigneur"), wherein he got to spend the first night of the marriage with the bride. (Apparently this did happen, but rarely, as it was a good way for the king to seriously piss off his subjects.) But the claim is that afterward -- and now we're in the realm of folk etymology -- the king gave his official permission for the bride and groom to go off and amuse themselves as they wished, at which point he stamped the couple's marriage documents "Fornication Under Consent of the King," meaning it was now legal for the couple to have sex with each other. The truth is, this is pure fiction. The word fuck comes from a reconstructed Proto-Germanic root *fug, meaning "to strike." There are cognates (same meaning, different spelling) in just about every Germanic language there is. In English, the word is one of the most amazing examples of lexical diversification I can think of; there's still the original sexual definition, but consider -- just to name a few -- "fuck that," "fuck around," "fuck's sake," "fuck up," "fuck-all," "what the fuck?", and "fuck off." Versatile fucking word, that one.
So anyway. Hope that sets the record straight. I hate coming off like a know-it-all, but in this case I actually do know what I'm talking about. A general rule of thumb (which has nothing to do with the diameter stick you're allowed to beat your wife with) is, "don't fuck with a linguist." No acronym needed to make that clear.
