Words that seem related but aren't (2015)

Folk Etymology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folk_etymology

This has a good list of words that came from misconceptions about etymology.

- “Crayfish”/“crawfish” mistakenly associated with “fish,” from Old French “crevice,” diminutive of their word for crab.

- A really great one: “chaise lounge” from the French “chaise longue” meaning long chair, the second word confused with the existing English word “lounge” meaning waiting or relaxing. Especially funny since the word order is swapped.

- “Cockroach” from the Spanish word for the insect, “cucaracha,” mistakenly identified with English words “cock” and “roach” (a type of fish, apparently)

-“Island” is from Old English “igland” which goes via Germanic back to PIE for “water” + “land.” But the spelling with the silent “s” comes from confusion with “isle,” an unrelated word from Old French.

- "Hangnail" used to mean a corn on the foot, from Old English "anguished" + "nail." Somehow the spelling got mixed up to "hang" and it started referring to a piece of skin/nail hanging.

Back-formation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back-formation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_back-formation...

It looks like English had some word pairs where in Latin the noun was roughly the verb plus “-ion,” like “opine” and “opinion,” but we recognized that pattern and erroneously applied it to other English nouns ending in “-ion” by dropping the suffix to create a noun, without actually inheriting the second word form from Latin. The example given is “resurrection” from Latin via Old French, and “resurrect” formed much later directly from the English noun. It’s a little confusing because it seems like, at least in the “resurrect” case, it also follows the rules of Latin, but I guess it’s just notable because in English it spawned much later from the existing English word rather than actually making its way organically to English from Latin.

Also “asset” and “assets” is from the Anglo-French singular noun “assetz,” mistakenly interpreted as plural because of the “s” sound at the end. There are tons of examples like this where the ends of words are incorrectly identified as suffixes and thus new words are formed by removing the fake suffix, like “edit” from “editor.” False positives in human pattern recognition.

Rebracketing:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing

This is the garden path thing of placing the parentheses in the wrong places, except for roots and affixes within a word, rather than within a sentence.

We erroneously included the Arabic word “al” (meaning “the”) in a bunch of nouns: algorithm, algebra, alcohol, alfalfa, alkaline, alcove, alchemy. Then in the 1500s this Agricola guy became obsessed with etymology, recognized the mistake, and corrected it to “chemical.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_chemistry. It wasn’t until the 1700s that “alchemy” started referring to bullshit supernatural chemistry.

The same thing happened with “alligator” from Spanish “el lagarto” meaning “the lizard,” then we humorously overcorrected and stumbled onto “gator.”

Other rebracketing examples:

- “Cybernetics” is cybern+etics, so “cyber-” is a mistake

- “Helicopter” is helico+pter, so “heli-” and “-copter” are mistakes

- The dog breed "labrad•oodle" (a cross between a Labrador Retriever and Poodle) has been rebracketed to "labra•doodle" leading to the "doodle" ending in other poodle crossbreeds such as the goldendoodle and Aussie doodle.

Random interesting things:

- “varsity” is just a 17th century shortening of “university”

- “Fancy” is a 15th century contraction of “fantasy,” and “fan” as in “sports fan” may have come from it and/or the unrelated “fanatic”

- Seems odd that “etymology” is the only English word from the Greek root “etymon” meaning “true sense”

- “Gross” meaning “disgusting” is from 1950s teenage slang, presumed to come from its prior meaning “total” (as in “gross revenue”), which was more commonly used with negative descriptors, e.g. “gross negligence” and “gross stupidity”

Latin was masculus and femella, old French was masle/male and femelle/femaile, modern "English" is male and female. We didn't take one from Latin and one from French -- we took both from French. It doesn't make any sense that "male" was taken from "masculus" when "masle" was already in use.