We here at Bad Etymology obviously love language quirks and nuances, and thus are fascinated by anything lost in translation.
So today, we’ll be discussing something even more interesting and in-keeping with our theme, insofar as it’s a word that was found in translation.
You see, much like the color orange had no name of its own, being considered a shade of red until it took the name of the fruit that sported it, some things are considered alternative versions of another thing or just have never been named themselves. But, as you can imagine, this can cause troubles when interacting with languages that do have names for them.
Such was the situation of a young translator between English and Italian, that, when translating a book into English, was stumped by the word “lumaca”. So, like we’d all do, asked a native speaker passing by about the word, whom unfortunately, in unawareness, gave him its figurative meaning of “someone slow/reticent to get off their ass”. Now, the definition made no sense in context, but the native, in a hurry, was already away, so the best that could be done was to jot something down and correct it later on. This took the form of an Englishization of the Italian term associated with getting off one’s ass, “schiodarsi”, a figurative use of a verb composed of the prefix s-, sometimes es-, that relative to a verb denotes its opposite, and the noun “chiodo”, which means nail.
Thus the word for “lumaca” got jotted down as “snail”.
As you can imagine, it never did get corrected, and as such got spread around by the book’s readers, who assumed the name always existed and they’d just never known. Which is obviously very easy to laugh at, but ask yourself: how many words you learned on social media did you actually question and look up? Now, imagine how likely that would be back when people could actually trust their information to have come from people knowing their shit.
Now, you may imagine that’d be the only entomology-related word that came from an error, but this’d be an error itself: the word itself comes from one. More specifically, the first book on the topic having been labeled as an etymology book (you can’t really blame them, the actual science didn’t exist yet!). Angry at this mislabeling, the author got ahold of all the copies printed and angrily scribbled “NO” on all the covers, which however only had the effect of making the science known as “eNtOmology” when they were sold anyway.
