You might be interested in the Anglish movement…
Office workers trade scuttlebutt by the water cooler. That has a long history because on sailing vessels, the scuttlebutt was literally a barrel of fresh water with a hole punched (i.e., scuttled) in its butt. It was the supply of drinking water for the crew, and presumably a good place to trade gossip about the ship.
Cool.
I heard one I really liked this week on A Way with Words, which incidentally is a great radio show and podcast if you like geeking out on language.
I was surprised to hear that “log”, when referring to a log book, “login”, and the like directly descend from “log”, a piece of wood. They share etymology with “knots” as a unit of speed, an etymology I had heard before.
Back in the day, they used to measure the speed of ships by tying a rope to a “chip log” (actually a board) and throwing the log in the water. The rope had knots tied at regular intervals. The chip log would sink directly beneath the ship, and rise closer to the surface the faster the ship was traveling. Think of it like a kite, and the motion of ship through the water like the wind. The higher the log floats, the more rope is visible. Count the visible knots and there’s your speed.
That was the part I knew, but I never realized why they wrote the results down in a “log” book. :smack:
This is not quite right - the chip is intended to remain near the surface when the ship is traveling at any significant speed. During a set amount of time (often a half minute, measured with a sand timer) the amount of rope that plays out from the reel is counted off (in “knots”), to reveal the ship’s speed. Here’s a link to the 1802 edition of “The American Practical Navigator” (The new American practical navigator : being an epitome of navigation, containing all the tables necessary ... : Bowditch, Nathaniel, 1773-1838 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive) describing the method.
P.S. I notice that your wikipedia cite says the same thing “When the navigator wished to determine the speed of his vessel, a sailor dropped the log over the stern of the ship. The log would act as a drogue and remain roughly in place while the vessel moved away. The log-line was allowed to run out for a fixed period of time. The speed of the ship was indicated by the length of log-line passing over the stern during that time.”
Close. Orchiectomy. The d in orchid is an extra letter. Similarly orciopexy is when the testicle is tacked into placed, such as after fixing a testicle twisted on itself cutting off the blood supply, or after an undescended testis is broght into the sac.
The root is the Greek “orkhis.”
Quick, half drunk post about something I heard a couple days ago, thought “hey, I know how that works”, and cited without reading. You got me. 
The word *quarantine ** is derived from the Italian (seventeenth century Venetian) quarantena, meaning forty-day period. When the plague arrived there in the early medieval period the smarter towns locked their gates for this period, which meant anyone outside who had it would have died or resisted the disease and the gates could then be re-opened safely.
- yes, cribbed from Wikipedia. But I originally read this in World Without End, the sequel to Pillars of the Earth.
Andy L already presented one of my favorites. Here’s another:
Cardinal comes from the Latin cardō, meaning hinge. Something that is cardinālis has to do with the pivotal axis from which something swings.
Sānus means “healthy”. Īnsānus means unhealthy strictly in reference to mental health. I suppose it may by transference mean “unclean”, but that usage is not mentioned in the Oxford Latin Dictionary.
Perseus is down right now, but I recall that the Greek root is also the source for pygmy (that is, people about the height of an outstretched fist), as well as the term pugilist, meaning a boxer.
The word “admiral” comes from the Arabic expression for a naval supreme commander: amir-al-bahr = “lord of the sea”. The Arabic term is believed to have been encountered by the Crusaders, possibly as early as the 11th Century, and adapted by them into the Medieval Latin admiralis; which morphed into “admiral” or near equivalent, in various European languages. “Admiral” is a “cut-short” version of the Arabic expression – signifying literally vis-a-vis same, just “lord of…”
The word “atone” is a contraction of “at one.” When you atone, you’re at one with God.
(I like this one because it’s so utterly implausible - it sounds just like the kind of sappy, fabricated folk-etymology you’d find in an e-mail forwarded by your sanctimonious aunt. Why should “atone” need a colorful origin story? Isn’t it just a bland Latinate word like, say, “attain”? But truth is stranger.)
When I first heard the song A Dios Le Pido, I mentioned that I misheard it as “adios libido” at which point a native speaker pointed out to me that adios is, actually, a contraction of “a Dios”. Goodbye is literally “(go) with God”.
We learned in Latin that muscle comes from the Latin for mouse, because your biceps look like there is a mouse under the skin. ETA: ninjad!
“Goodbye” in English started out as “God be with you”, which became “goodbye” after a series of contractions and then confusion with expressions like “good morning” etc.
Correction: I meant for the final words to be, “lord of the…”
Can anyone explain, then, how it came to be spelled “bistro”? French has a perfectly usable vowel sound that would come much closer to the Russian pronunciation, realistically the word should be spelled “bûstro”. I am not convinced of this etymology, it just does not make sense.
Yeah, maybe it’s not right.
Two food items:
Tempura (or tenpura) is not Japanese in origin, but Portuguese/Latin. From the Latin phrase “quattuor tempora” indicating the times when meat was not eaten.
Vindaloo, also from the Portuguese and not Hindi. Wine (vinha) and garlic (alho). The actual dish the name comes from is “Carne de Vinha d’ Alhos” which morphs to Vindaloo.
Purple comes from the word purpura, which is a shell-fished creature which they harvested to get the color. The R was often changed to L back then due to mis-hearing.
Not quite similarly, a belfry was originally a berfry. But backwards etymology decided that it should be spelled belfry, you know, since there were bells in it. Likewise for hiccup, which is occasionally spelled hiccough, because, you know, it sounds somewhat like a cough. Apparently.
And completely unrelated, I recently learned that in Shakespearian times, the word “nothing” was slang for vagina. Because we girls have nothing down there, as opposed to men, who do. (It’s in the wiki, believe it or not.) Makes the play Much Ado About Nothing and almost every line in it take on a whole new meaning.
Hamlet: Or did you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That’s a fair thought, to lie between maid’s legs.
Hey, now that I have you guys here, a question.
The color brown is called marrón in Spanish, marroi in Euskera, marró in Catalan. RAE very helpfully if a bit redundantly tells is it comes from the French marron, “a chestnut-colored edible chestnut” (that’s the marron in marron glacé). Does the English maroon come from the same or a different root? At least when I’ve heard Americans describe something as “maroon”, it was a different color.