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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 also be described as folk etymologies, the distinction being that folk etymologies are widely believed to be true, and of anonymous origin. The terms may be used in two distinct ways:

• A commonly held misunderstanding of the origin of a particular word.
• "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."

Source and influence

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 Some are simply outdated.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scholars in the early modern period began to produce more reliable results, but many of their hypotheses have been superseded. Even today, knowledge in the field advances so rapidly that many of the etymologies in contemporary dictionaries are outdated.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 in Dutch, Afrikaans volksetimologie, Danish folkeetymologi, Swedish folketymologi, and full parallels in non-Germanic languages, e.g. Hungarian népetimológia, French étymologie populaire and Israeli Hebrew etimológya amamít (popular etymology). Examples of alternative names are Italian pseudoetimologia and paretimologia (<paraetimologia), as well as English etymythology.

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".

Association with urban legends

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 "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, 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 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.

Folk etymology as a productive force

Folk etymology is particularly important because it can result in the modification of a word or phrase by analogy with the erroneous etymology which is popularly believed to be true and supposed to be thus 'restored'. In such cases, 'folk etymology' is the trigger which causes the process of linguistic analogy by which a word or phrase changes because of a popularly-held etymology, or misunderstanding of the history of a word or phrase. Here the term 'folk etymology' is also used (originally as a shorthand) to refer to the change itself, and knowledge of the popular etymology is indispensable for the (more complex) true etymology of the resulting 'hybridized' word.

Other misconceptions which leave the word unchanged may of course be ignored, but are generally not called popular etymology. The question of whether the resulting usage is "correct" or "incorrect" depends on one's notion of correctness and is in any case distinct from the question of whether a given etymology is correct.

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, or sand-blind, from samblind, i.e. semi-, half-blind), 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.

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.

Examples of words modified by folk etymology

In linguistic change caused by folk etymology, the form of a word changes so that it better matches its popular rationalisation. For example:

• Old English sam-blind ("semi-blind" or "half-blind") became sand-blind (as if "blinded by the sand") when people were no longer able to make sense of the element sam ("half").
• Old English bryd-guma ("bride-man") became bridegroom after the Old English word guma fell out of use and made the compound semantically obscure.
• The silent s in island is a result of folk etymology. This native Old English 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 "isle", which had come to English via Old French from Latin insula ("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, island is related, not to Latin insula, but rather to Latin aqua ("water"). (For a use of ēa, see Eton, Berkshire, Origin of the Name.)
• buttonhole from buttonhold (originally a loop of string that held a button down)
• Charterhouse from Chartreuse, the feminine of Chartreux
• hangnail from agnail
• penthouse from pentice
• shamefaced from shamefast ("caught in shame")
• chaise lounge from chaise longue ("long chair")
• lanthorn (as old lanterns were glazed with strips of cows' horn) from lantern
• A slug of liquor from the Irish word slog, meaning to swallow
• Butt-naked from the term Buck-naked.
• French (e)crevisse (likely from Germanic krebiz) which became the English crayfish.
• asparagus, which in England became sparrow-grass.
• cater-corner became kitty-corner or catty-corner when the original meaning of cater ("four") had become obsolete.

Other changes due to folk etymology include:

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".

Further examples

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

• belfry (architecture)
• blunderbuss
• brass monkey
• Brent Goose
• Caesarean section
• chaise longue
• chav
• crawfish
• dork
• dormouse
• ducking stool
• gringo
• hamburger
• Jerusalem artichoke
• poll tax
• rake-hell
• serviceberry
• 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 is derived from sapere (to be wise).

The spelling of the English word posthumous 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 ("welcome" or "good wind") after the Roman conquest.

The Dutch word for "hammock" is hangmat, ("hanging mat") formed as a folk etymology of Spanish hamaca.

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 grizzled or silver-tipped, but its name was later mistakenly derived from grisly meaning “horrible”. This error has been perpetuated in the grizzly bear's scientific trinomial name: Ursus arctos horribilis.

The Mandarin word for "crisis", wēijī, is often said to be "composed of two characters, one represent danger, and the other represent opportunity." The character jī, however, does not mean "opportunity," and linguists generally dismiss this folk etymology as fanciful.

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.

See also

• Backronym
• Back-formation
• Chinese translation of crisis
• Eggcorn
• Johannes Goropius Becanus
• Okay
• Phono-semantic matching
• Pseudoscientific language comparison
• Slang dictionary

Notes

1. OED, second edition, 1989.
2. R.L. Trask (1996). A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology. London; New York: Routledge.
3. See Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad (2006), "'Etymythological Othering' and the Power of 'Lexical Engineering' in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. A Socio-Philo(sopho)logical Perspective", Explorations in the Sociology of Language and Religion, edited by Tope Omoniyi and Joshua A. Fishman, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 237-258.
4. "The Origins and Development of the English Language", 4th ed., Thomas Pyles and John Algeo, 1993.
5. World Wide Words etymology of "rule of thumb"
6. Urban Legends reference pages on supposed etymology of picnic
7. Urban Legends reference pages on supposed etymology of buck
8. Urban Legends reference pages on supposed origin of crowbar
9. Article on the etymology of the word niggardly
10. Etymology of the word cracker
11. Article on false etymology of the word cracker
12. Remarks by President Kennedy at the Convocation of the United Negro College Fund
13. Mair, Victor H. (2005). "danger + opportunity ≠ crisis: How a misunderstanding about Chinese characters has led many astray". PinyinInfo.com. Retrieved 15 January 2009.
14. Zimmer, Benjamin (27 March 2007). "Crisis = danger + opportunity: The plot thickens". Language Log. Retrieved 19 January 2009.

References

• Anatoly Liberman (2005). Word Origins ... and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195161472.
• Adrian Room (1986). Dictionary of True Etymologies. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7102-0340-3.
• David Wilton (2004). Word Myths: Debunking Linguistic Urban Legends. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-517284-1.
• Ghil'ad Zuckermann (2003). Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. (Palgrave Studies in Language History and Language Change, Series editor: Charles Jones). ISBN 1-4039-1723-X.

External links

• Richard Lederer, Spook Etymology on the Internet
• Popular fallacies in the attribution of phrase origins
• EtymologyOnLine - both true and folk etymologies- here mainly examples of popular etymologies

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)

• Etymology
• Error
• Language comparison
• Urban legends