The origins of etymythology

When I was a child a friend of the family would give me a book of jokes every Christmas. I would then proceed to shamble around the house like a small curse, reciting jokes in a robotic monotone with barely a pause. This would continue until whichever came first between one of my brothers hitting me, my dad snatching the book from my hands, or Mum bursting into tears.

I relate this anecdote because a few years ago, having received a copy of Michael Quinion's Port Out, Starboard Home and Other Language Myths, my inner child rose again like a particularly irritating revenant, only now it wasn't jokes but the explosion of false etymologies that were its antisocial refrain. Other than that, and the fact that this time round I remembered to modulate my voice, things proceeded in much the same manner. By which I mean that I found the whole process addictively pleasurable while my unwilling audience detested me.

I've always had an instinctive distrust of neatly logical, entertaining explanations for how certain words and phrases came about. This is due in part to my embarrassing hobby of reading the dictionary in times of repose, and thus learning something of the generally messy, uncertain and fairly dull nature of etymology. It's also, if I'm being honest, down to being a prideful know-all who prefers interesting facts to originate from me rather than "the competition" (read "anyone else").

For some reason that I can't fathom, people seem to enjoy hearing that "shit" (the word, not the substance) originated "in olden times" when wet manure stowed in ships' holds would ferment, generate hazardous methane and explode. Therefore, sacks of manure would be marked SHIT (meaning Ship High In Transit). Try telling them that the genuine origin of the word lies in the Old English "scitte" (diarrhoea), which is related to the Dutch "schijten" and German "Scheisse", and it's yawns all around.

Similarly, in Mexico last December I was amazed by the amount of people who gave credence to the term "gringo" originating during the Mexican-American War, where Mexican civilians would supposedly use it to express their opinion of green-coated American soldiers ("green, go!") This despite the fact that the US Army didn't have green uniforms until the 1940s. But any interest generated by my scoffing was soon frittered away by my feeble attempts to relate Quinion's two-page explanation with any panache. (For anyone who is interested, it's from a Spanish version of a medieval Latin phrase denoting unintelligibility, which also spawned our Shakespeare-imported "it's all Greek to me". Shall I go on? Thought not.)

I fared better, having recently read the relevant entry, when one of my brothers wheeled out that elderly chestnut about an English king loving a particular cut of beef so much that he knighted it - "Arise, Sir Loin!". As Quinion writes, this is "one of the daftest examples of uncritical folk etymology extant", which judgment I relayed word perfectly prior to mercilessly exploding my brother's explanation. I was so happy that I might even have done a little dance.

To be fair to my sibling, this bit of nonsense has been doing the rounds since Thomas Fuller identified the suitably obese Henry VIII as the king in question in his 1665 seaport bestseller, The Church-History of Britain. The true etymology, that it comes from the Old French "surloigne" ("sur" - above; "loigne" - loin) is utterly logical and perfectly boring. Who wouldn't prefer a story about a meat-mad monarch knighting steaks? Other than me, that is.

If this all seems rather curmudgeonly, I could offer in my defence that these etymythologies, as professor Laurence Horne has dubbed them, can spread so fast as to pose a threat to the true origins of the English language. But that's not really true. It's just that some of them really are very, very silly.

So, if you want to go etymythology-bashing yourself the most useful advice of Quinion's I can pass on is to distrust explanations involving the usage of acronyms predating 1900 (they only really started to become common during the first world war, and the word "acronym" itself wasn't coined until 1943), which gets rid of a host of appealing but spurious etymologies for words the origins of which are a good deal more complex. Just don't expect anyone to give a fornication under consent of the king.

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