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Folk etymology, in its basic sense, refers to popularly held (and often false) beliefs about the origins of specific words and phrases, especially where these originate in "common-sense" assumptions and the construction of ex post facto narratives rather than serious research (compare folk science, folk psychology etc.).

The phenomenon leads to distinct but related usages for the phrase in historical linguistics and in folklore.

Jan Harold Brunvand defines the two usages thus:

“A process by which people either

• (1) mispronounce or change pronunciations of foreign or strange-sounding words to make them similar to, or compatible phonologically with, other words in their lexicons,

or

• (2) explain from hearsay evidence how particular words originated.”

In its folkloric sense the term refers to the [[sometimes fanciful urban legends) constructed ex post facto to account for the current form of words and phrases. 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 term has been used for the past century to refer to belief tales about the origins of a given word or phrase.

Source and influence of false etymologies

Erroneous etymologies can exist for many reasons. Some are reasonable interpretations of the evidence that happen to be false. 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 often 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scholars in the early modern period began to produce more reliable results, but many of their hypotheses have been superseded. Even today, knowledge in the field advances so rapidly that many of the etymologies in contemporary dictionaries are outdated.

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).

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.

See also

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

Notes

Folk etymology, in its basic sense, refers to popularly held (and often false) beliefs about the origins of specific words and phrases, especially where these originate in "common-sense" assumptions and the construction of ex post facto narratives rather than serious research (compare folk science, folk psychology etc.).

The phenomenon leads to distinct but related usages for the phrase in historical linguistics and in folklore.

Jan Harold Brunvand defines the two usages thus:

“A process by which people either

• (1) mispronounce or change pronunciations of foreign or strange-sounding words to make them similar to, or compatible phonologically with, other words in their lexicons,

or

• (2) explain from hearsay evidence how particular words originated.”

In historical linguistics, Folk etymology is a change in the pronunciation, meaning, or spelling of a word under the influence of popular beliefs about its origins.

Folk etymology as a productive force

"Folk etymology", a translation of the German Volksetymologie from Ernst Förstemann's essay Ueber Deutsche Volksetymologie in the 1852 work Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung auf dem Gebiete des Deutschen, Griechischen und Lateinischen (Journal of Comparative Linguistic Research in the Areas of German, Greek and Latin), is used in historical linguistics to refer a change in the form of a word caused by erroneous popular beliefs about its derivation.

Erroneous etymologies can exist for many reasons. Some are reasonable interpretations of the evidence that happen to be false. 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. 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.

The phenomenon becomes especially interesting when it feeds back into the development of the word and thus becomes a part of a new etymology. Believing a word to have a certain origin, people begin to pronounce, spell, or otherwise 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. This popular etymologizing has had a powerful influence on the forms which words take. Examples in English include 'crayfish' or 'crawfish', from the French crevis; 'sand-blind', from the older samblind (i.e. semi-, half-blind); or 'chaise lounge' for the original French chaise longue.

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 (cognate with Latin "homo") 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 the origin of the name of Eton, Berkshire)
• asparagus, which became sparrow-grass.
• butt-naked from the term buck-naked.
• cater-corner became kitty-corner or catty-corner when the original meaning of cater ('four') had become obsolete.
• chaise lounge from chaise longue 'long chair'
• Charterhouse from Chartreuse, the feminine of Chartreux
• Middle English crevis, from Middle French crevice (from Germanic krebiz) became crayfish due to assimilation with fish.
• Causey was modified to causeway to assimilate it with way.
• hangnail from agnail
• lanthorn (as old lanterns were glazed with strips of cows' horn) from lantern
• liquorice, a British variant spelling of licorice, from the supposition that it has something to do with liquid, though the actual origin is Greek glykyrrhiza 'sweet root'
• posthumous, as though related to humus, [grave-]soil, although it is a specialized sense of Latin postumus, 'last'.
• penthouse from pentice
• shamefaced from shamefast 'caught in shame'

In heraldry, canting arms (which may express 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.

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
• craic
• crawfish
• dork
• dormouse
• ducking stool
• fuck
• gringo
• hamburger
• Hoosier
• Jerusalem artichoke
• Jordan almonds
• poll tax
• pumpernickle
• rake-hell
• serviceberry
• sic
• sincere
• tahash
• 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).

Late Latin widerdonum (Old French guerdon) was an alteration, due to confusion with Latin donum "gift", of Old High German widarlôn "recompense, reward, pay-back".

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. A similar story goes for the Swedish word hängmatta, Finnish riippumatto and the German Hängematte.

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 Mandarin word for "crisis", wēijī, is often said to be "composed of two characters, one represent[ing] danger, and the other represent[ing] opportunity." The character jī, however, does not mean "opportunity," and linguists generally dismiss this folk etymology as fanciful. False etymologies for individual Chinese characters are also common.

The Finnish compound word for "jealous" mustasukkainen literally means "black socked" (musta "black" and sukka "sock"). However, the word is a case of a misunderstood loan translation from Swedish svartsjuk ("black sick"). The Finnish word sukka fit with a close phonological equivalent to the Swedish sjuk

Islambol (Islambol as one of the names of Istanbul used after the Ottoman conquest of 1453)

Acceptance of resulting forms

The question of whether the resulting usage is "correct" or "incorrect" is subjective and is at any rate a separate issue from the question of whether the assumed etymology is correct. When a word changes in form or meaning owing to folk etymology, there is typically resistance to the change on the part of those who are aware of the true etymology. Many words altered through folk etymology survive beyond such resistance however, to the point where they entirely replace the original form in the language. Chaise lounge and Welsh rarebit are still often disparaged, for example, 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

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

• Folk etymologies (a collection of folk etymologies)
• 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)