#folk etymology

[caterjunes]

i'm the girl who makes up all the fake folk etymologies. it's fun and easy for me. nobody pays me, i just do it for the love of the game.

[official-linguistics-post]

i've seen yet another short video presenting folk etymology as actual fact, so i'd just like to remind everyone that a cohesive story about a specific circumstance is very rarely the source of common words.

(today's example: no, the word "hangover" is not from some tradition of plying condemned londoners with booze on their way to tyburn, who would be released if the hanging didn't work on the first try. it's originally a synonym of "holdover," used in the sense of the effects of drinking in american english by the early 20th century. etymonline entry here.)

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Folk Etymology

Folk etymology - erroneous forms of words that become part of a language because enough people made the same wrong guess; also called popular etymology

Example: When people hear a foreign or unfamiliar word for the first time, they try to make sense of it by relating it to words they know well. They guess what it must mean – and often guess wrongly.

Some Folk Etymology

sparrow-grass: A popular name for asparagus – though this vegetable has nothing to do with sparrows.

cockroach: The name came from Spanish cucuracha, the first part of which must have been particularly obscure to English ears. There is no connection with cock.

helpmate: The form comes from a Bible translation of Genesis 2.18, when God said ‘I will make him a help meet for him’. Meet in this context is an adjective, meaning ‘suitable’; but the popular view preferred to take the word as a form of mate.

salt-cellar: In Old French, a salier was a salt-box. When the word came into English, the connection with salt was evidently not clear, and people started calling the object a salt-saler. The modern form has no connection with a cellar.

Source ⚜ More References: Word Lists ⚜ Semantic Change

[floatyhands]

Over the years, various parts of the Internet have decided that the joke about the chicken crossing the road to get to the other side is about the chicken getting run over or trying to kill itself. Because, the reasoning goes, “the other side” is the afterlife. 

This annoys me so much. "Why did the chicken cross the road" is not a suicide/death joke, it's an anti-joke. It sets up an expectation of a silly riddle-based pun or absurd punchline through the inclusion of an inherently slightly silly animal (chicken) and then delivers a non-joke answer. The joke is meant to suck ass. It is only funny because it sucks ass. It's meant to make you groan and go "bruhhhh".

You might be saying: “okay but jokes are subjective. It's not funny either way, why are you trying to correct people with an alternative joke explanation?” Well, first of all, I'm an annoying pedant, and second, I think the explanation makes the joke even worse.

“The chicken died/killed itself” is actively less funny than the anti-joke explanation in a way that DOES NOT EFFECTIVELY SUBVERT AN EXPECTATION CREATED BY THE SETUP. Not only does it require MORE explanation than the anti-joke version, it introduces an idea that is not hinted at by the premise that makes the joke more complicated. There is nothing about a chicken crossing a road that suggests suicidality. While one would expect a chicken to get run over, the fact that someone has to actively think hard to come up with the "other side = death" pun to work fucks up the pacing of the joke.

The reason for this need for explanation is that "why did the chicken cross the road” exists in a space where the specific cultural contexts and conditions required to make its anti-joke properties funny have been lost to the sands of time.

I believe I’m not the first person to come up with this argument, but the reasoning is thus. The problem is that it is only funny if the listener is:

Already familiar with pun-based Dad Joke Riddles that are formatted as "Why did [slightly improbable creature] [do a slightly unusual but mundane thing]? [PUN-BASED PUNCHLINE!]" This used to be extremely common in joke books, which nobody buys anymore.

Not familiar with Dad Jokes enough to have heard of the famous Chicken Cross The Road version, so the punchline remains novel, surprising and subversive.

However, due to changing times (most jokes do not follow that format anymore) and overexposure of the Chicken Cross The Road joke, this means that almost nobody is able to fulfil either requirement to enjoy the joke.

So people, especially people who post a lot on social media in certain spaces, who are likely to be a bit socially awkward, feel the need to invent a new reason for the joke to be deeper/more funny by retrofitting a pun. So every year some person tries to go “OMG I JUST REALISED IT'S ABOUT THE CHICKEN DYING”. And it blows up on social media as this massive revelation. Sometimes this comes with a slight hint of us-versus-them sentiment, where the designated “normies” who are “in the know” about why this clearly not-very-funny joke is funny to them, have a taste for finding animal deaths amusing, and are therefore lame and mean-spirited.

Just like folk etymologies (i.e. wrong but popular explanations for a word), especially the ones that turn short words into explainable acronyms, they bring order and explanation to an arbitrary and confusing world that we once had context to but have since lost. There's a sense of revelation. Of discovery. You, underdog who has never gotten the joke, have finally unlocked the secret and hidden meanings to a joke that the normie elites have known about. 

Well guess what! The joke sucks for whatever demographic you think the normies are too! That's the point! Nobody finds this joke funny!

[yvanspijk]

Cockroach stems from Spanish cucaracha. When cucaracha was borrowed, it was opaque to English speakers. Trying to rationalise it, they associated it with the familiar words cock and roach and changed its pronunciation. This type of change is called folk etymology. Here are more examples.

[mollyringle]

Today I learned—or rather, confirmed via this page and others—that the term "dead ringer" does not have origins in people buried alive and pulling a coffin bell-rope for help, as some like to claim. "Ringer" was horse-race slang for a similar-looking horse substituted for the scheduled one, and "dead" is slang for "exact" or "precise."

That page also tells me that "saved by the bell" is, similarly, not about said coffin bell-ropes. It comes from boxing.

[specialagentartemis]

deeply tired reminder that the proverb “blood is thicker than water” has been used in the English language since the 1600s, and its ultimate origins may be from the 1100s; the longer version that tumblr likes, “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb,” is first attested in a book from the 1990s by a “Messianic Rabbi” with no sources. It’s literally prefaced by “Warning: The truths contained in the following teaching are not for the faint of heart, or the lukewarm! You can be sure that haSatan (the adversary) will do all he can to keep you from understanding and applying the concepts and truths contained herein”. The whole covenant framing is being used here to justify a “Jews for Jesus” interpretation of Judaism. It’s not “original” in any sense. The idea of blood covenants is a very old one, but there's no evidence that that's what that proverb refers to at all, and certainly not in those specific words (and this guy never even claimed that the specific words were original, just the sense of them). And the Brothers Grimm even suggested the "water" being referred to in the phrase was the water of baptism.

You are not obligated to like the sentiment expressed by “blood is thicker than water.” You don’t have to agree with proverbs. You are perfectly allowed to like the sentiment of “ the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb” better. But it is not in any way “authentic” or the “real” version, and it was not corrupted into the common version. Please.

[restroom]