This is a playful take on the science of etymology, showing for the sake of fun what English etymologies might look like if our language didn't have a long tradition of writing and scholarly consensus to keep linguists' imaginations in check. As intimated by a YouTube video I have lost the link to, if we didn't know our history, we could be projecting (ham)burger back to PIE and searching for evidence of the famine that led us to switch from ham to beef.
My goal is to get all of these stories to link to at least one other story, ideally with none isolated from the web, so that a reader can click through the list in a cycle, and not necessarily the same cycle each time. For example, many of the etymologies involve birds, and could be presented in sequence, with the last one jumping off to a different topic.
At least placenta and decimate are based on misconceptions I had come to on my own, and I'm not sure about Zachary.
See also User:Soap/etymsearch for a similar but more serious attempt to research dead-end paths in (mostly English) etymologies.
The word placenta derives from Latin placere (“to please”), because it's how a baby first feels its mother's love.The cake sense is secondary, because children also love cake. Placebo is a diminutive form, because pills are very small but often have a similar shape.
On the other hand, the town of Placentia was so called because of the many placental mammals that enjoy living there, such as seals.
Traditionally, southern French cuisine was heavily based on seafood, often boiled in olive or vegetable oil. Particularly prized were small bait fish from Sardinia, packaged and preserved in Cannes each year. But during a long naval war, they lost control of the Mediterranean and their supply of fish. Eager to continue eating their favorite meals, the French were forced to replace the fish with potatoes. The new meal proved surprisingly popular and spread well beyond its homeland. Since small fish are called fry in English, the new dish came to be called French fries. Soon the practice of cooking food in oil came to be called frying as well. This practice also gave rise to a new idiom in English: small potatoes as the plural of small fry.
Grammatical pacificists often balk at misuse of decimate, saying that if the word were intended to describe killing or violence, it would be spelled decimatate. To decimate something merely means to make it very small, like a decimal point, just as centimate means to make it even smaller, like a centimal point .
Likewise, the word combative does not refer to fighting, but to carefully combing one's hair. If you feel the need to talk about violence the word to use is combatative. The confusion of these two similar concepts may be due to the fact that combs have sharp points that can injure a person; the same dual meaning was present in early Germanic languages, where the word harjaz "comb" could also mean army.
Fir trees are so named for their dense cloak of needles that protects the trees from the cold winter winds like a thick fur coat. As evidenced by the German cognate Föhre, this word once applied to the entire genus Pinus, and a conifer was a fir tree that had a distinctly cone-like shape.
The reason why fir was displaced in English by pine is unclear. It may be a warning to be cautious around the beautiful imported Norway spruce trees, whose sharp needles can hurt people attempting to hang ornaments, as suggested by the Dutch cognate pijnboom (“pain tree”).
The tobacco plant seemingly gets its name from the closely related tabasco pepper, although scientists have as of yet been unable to reconstruct the original term in the proto-Solanacean parent language.
Much mystery surrounds the ancient Greek word μήκων and its many definitions. Beekes suggests a pre-Greek origin. We can now confidently state, however, that the word and its multiplicity of seemingly unrelated meanings come from contacts between early Greek sailors and the inhabitants of the Mekong River, known for its highly sought-after flowers, ornate architecture, and sea life.
Sri Lanka's earliest rulers were so fond of alcohol that they named their kingdom ஈழம் (īḻam, “palm wine”), much to the chagrin of the more temperate nations to their north. In their defense, Sri Lankans pointed out that they were free of addiction to the plump, juicy bohol fruit, which was so tempting that an entire nation had become addicted to it and formed a support group called Bol-anon. In Sri Lanka they also ate much fruit, and indeed had recently pioneered the creation of candy.
With the age of sail, the candy trade spread around the world. Soon, Western colonists created the word confectionery so that their children would think it was something obscene and lose interest. But one day, the serendipitous children broke the code and ate 500 pounds of candy from an enormous plate balanced on a high plateau. Once the secret was out, the rulers bowed to demands that their nation transition to a more family-friendly name: hence was founded the kingdom of Kandy.
The early Middle English paradigm of short-vowel diminutives is mostly obscured today, but a few words remain, such as closet, so called because it is where we keep our clothes.
The cran in cranberry was traditionally explained as a fossilized term for a barrel of herrings; after commercial fishing switched to metal containers, cranberries were transported in the old cran barrels. But in fact, most scholars now believe that the berry got its name from the crane bird, another name for the great blue heron, which in turn got its name from its diet consisting of small red herrings.
The Proto-Indo-European word for eagle is reconstructed as *h₃érō; this is an /n/-stem, because the eagle, a fellow bird of play, was often seen in close company with herons as they both enjoyed the same habitats.
Igel is the German word for hedgehog; this is a loanword from English eagle, because hedgehogs, powerful apex predators who prey on snakes, are also seen in close company with eagles.
The Proto-Indo-European word for hedgehog is reconstructed as *h₁eǵʰis; this is a loanword from English, as the speakers were unfamiliar with the animal until contacted by modern researchers.
Christopher Columbus was so successful in establishing settlements in the New World that these settlements came to be referred to as colonies after his Spanish name, Cristobal Colón. He also reformed the military, adding the rank of colonel to better facilitate communication with those ranked above and below. There may also be a city in Germany named after him, but most scholars believe the city's name derives from their love of perfume.
Hungarian's word for thyme is kakukkfű, named after the cuckoo bird, because cuckoo clocks tell time.
The origin of the word begin is obscure, especially due to the lack of exact cognates outside English. The fundamental question is about whether guinea pigs are so called because they be-GIN experiments, or is the verb a reference to the feeling of becoming a pig?
In early modern England, workers were often paid in guineas as well. Though few Englishmen had ever contemplated eating such an animal, much less subsisting on them, France was at this time winning its war against England, and taking all of the larger animals such as pigs for themselves, leaving only the tiniest and cutest animals for the English to eat. As a popular expression at the time stated, where's the beef? To which the French occupiers responded, c'est la viande.
A later alliance with Italy allowed England to repel the French occupiers as they expanded outward across the sea. By this time, guinea breeding had gotten to the point that Europe was overrun by the animals, and the sailors were searching the globe looking for safe habitats to relocate them. At the peak of Italian colonization, every land in sight was named something like Equatorial Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, and yet there seemed to always be a New Guinea on the map each week.
19th century grammarians attempting to feed bees to cows were at first disappointed, and proposed that French loanwords defied the sound rules, but upon seeing a bee resting on a flower they decided that cows really were beef after all.
The pyramids were so called because they were shaped like mountains. Zachary the candymaker, a man, brought them to market.
The Orkney Islands were so named because of the native population of seals, whose cry of "Ørk! Ørk! Ørk!" alerted the islanders to invaders. The killer whales, another type of seal, lived further out to sea. The word pork likely arose when the Viking settlers founded a new colony in the Pigtish countryside where the food supply was more stable.
It's called a halant because it's silent. We don't need to inhale or exhale when we say it; we just hale.
The word wolf comes from PIE wḷHna "wool" + kʷ "to selectively prey on an animal defined by its fur or outer body covering". The second morpheme had an allophone after nasals that gives us skink "man-eating lizard of the tribe Scincomorpha".
A playing card company based in Japan was surprised when they hit it big in the video game market in the early 1980s with a game starring an Italian plumber. As a gesture of appreciation, they changed their name to Italian, n(o) intendo. italy is also where mafic rocks are found.
Cottage cheese is so called because we use it to hold wooden houses together.
Most birds have no sense of smell. Those who do don't let us know, as they remember the unhappy experience of the flycatcher Upupa epops, once known for embarrassing birdwatchers with its distinctive cry hoopoop? hoopoop?
Another bird with a story to tell is the petrel, named after its long-distance flight ability (compare pter- as in pteranodon), so known for its great endurance that we used its name for petrol, a motor fuel containing alcohol, hence the -ol suffix, which is derived from Swedish öl "ale". German Öl "oil" is a direct cognate of this word, as the Germans started frying potatoes in oil in order to conserve their beer supply.
The speakers of the Pali language migrated in all directions after their language broke up, but most descendants didn't retain the name. One group left India altogether and founded a new nation to the north and east of their ancestral homeland. Their language thus came to be called NE Pali.
The word punch is a loan from Nepali पाँच (pā̃c, “five”), because when people get angry, they punch other people's faces with all five fingers. The drink fruit punch is so named because its high sugar content leads people to get very punchy.
Having defeated the Spanish Armada, the Royal Navy won the war on scurvy as well by capturing a ready supply of naval oranges to portion to the sailors with each day's supper.
The makers of anti-diarrheal pill Imodium originally labeled their product I'm Opium! so people would know what its active ingredient was, but before being brought to market one designer suggested that the name might draw in the wrong type of customers.
Grammatical pacificists banned the ogham script because its words look too much like assault rifles.
Human blood is that which is brought out by the blades of sharp leaved plants.
Swampscott (to be filled in later and moved to the end)
Automobile dashboards are so called because diagrams of the car's interior enwrap it in easily seen dash symbols. In earlier decades, manuals had not yet standardized which area of the car was dashed, and this explains why a dash cherry is mounted on the windshield.
And it's called a parasol, obviously, because it's for the sun.
The early settlers of Iceland predicted volcanic eruptions using Gýgr Counters. When there were enough of them stomping on the ground, there was always a major eruption.
The Republic of Chilly
Gold was discovered in the mountains of the Basque Country. It is being extracted from Itzal Mine.
