Your favourite etymology trivia!

[Peter Morris]

The word titchy meaning small has an interesting derivation. Ultimately it comes from the Tichbourne case. The heir to the Tichbourne fortune had been lost at sea. A man named Arthur Orton turned up impersonating the dead man. Orton was known as a very large man, in contrast to the slender build of the real heir. Thus 'Tich' became a nickname for large men.

In the late 19th and early 20th century there was a popular music hall entertainer Harry Relph. He was a very small man, and overweight as a youth, he became known as Little Tich. And thus tich became a nickname for mall men, having reversed it's meaning.

[samclem]

Originally Posted by GuanoLad

I'm lost. So many of these don't sound convincing, have been proven incorrect, or are just doubted, that I have decided not to believe any of them, as that seems the safest approach.

Please don't take that approach. Most of the ones in this thread are actually true. Pick and choose what you want, and ask about it. Someone will be along to prove to you that it's true or false.

[matt_mcl]

Originally Posted by Peter Morris

But why did Constantinople get the works?

That's nobody's business but the Turks'.

Originally Posted by JKellyMap

True. That's why the regular Spanish word for "rusty", oxidado, sounds so silly to us -- "rusty" feels earthy and strong, while "oxidated" feels scientific and weak. But native Spanish speakers don't feel that dichotomy, because their normal vocabulary comes right from Latin (most of it, anyway).

You can still get a similar etymological difference between earthy and learned terms in Romance languages because often, earthier terms are the ones that evolved from the original Vulgar Latin from which the language was formed, or from other languages in the area where the language evolved (such as Celtic or Germanic languages), whereas more learned terms were borrowed directly from Latin later in the day (in French called emprunts savants) -- say naissance and parturition, or boeuf and bovin.

A similar example is the road sign "Disminuya su velocidad." Or, as we would say, SLOW DOWN! (Even Spock wouldn't say something as professorial as "diminish your velocity").

My favourite in this department is the announcement made on the Madrid metro, Atención, estación en curva. Al salir, tengan cuidado para no introducir el pié entre coche y andén, which means "Mind the gap."

Of course, they (or at least Barcelona) also boil down "Please allow patrons to disembark before boarding" to the admirably terse Dejen salir.

[JKellyMap]

Originally Posted by matt_mcl

You can still get a similar etymological difference between earthy and learned terms in Romance languages because often, earthier terms are the ones that evolved from the original Vulgar Latin from which the language was formed, or from other languages in the area where the language evolved (such as Celtic or Germanic languages), whereas more learned terms were borrowed directly from Latin later in the day (in French called emprunts savants) -- say naissance and parturition, or boeuf and bovin.

That's true. We have a few doublets in English that are sort of like this, where one word is ultimately from Latin or Greek, but has gotten dirty (in form and, often, in meaning) by getting churned through various languages (Old French, typically); meanwhile, its friend has come to us "clean", by being adopted by Renaissance scholars, say.

I'm pretty sure chair and cathedral is such a doublet, for example.

[matt_mcl]

As are jumeau (twin) and Gémeaux (constellation Gemini).

[Mikeisskeptical]

Hysteria comes from the word for womb (same root as hysterectomy). Saying someone is hysterical, basically means they're acting like a woman.

[Wendell Wagner]

There is even one case where the same word, originally from Ancient Greek, got borrowed into English through various routes five or maybe seven times: discus, disc, disk, diskette, dish, desk, and dais. (I'm not sure whether to count "disc," "diskette," and "disk" as separate times.)

[Sister Vigilante]

Along the lines of the different words for butterfly, pineapple is similar.