Your favorite unexpected etymology

“Marconi plays the mamba…”

So, how does one play a poisonous snake? What kind of musical instrument would that be? A flute? A stringed instrument?

Reading that is probably a good indication of what a non-science-inclined person feels like trying to read about chemistry. “What’s with all those goofy words? Wait, was an uncleft an atom or a molecule? Which word was an element?”

Same root, according to Search 'maroon' on etymonline

I would say that the color maroon is more reddish than brownish, but it is a darker red. Google image searching chestnuts, it would be fair to call them maroon, at least the redder images.

“Tabernacle” and “tavern” both come from the same Latin root word, taberna.

Hot dog

“~ around 1894-95, students at Yale University began to refer to the wagons selling hot sausages in buns as dog wagons. One at Yale was even given the nickname of “The Kennel Club”. It was only a short step from this campus use of dog to hot dog, and this fateful move was made in a story in the issue of the Yale Record for 19 October 1895, which ended, “They contentedly munched hot dogs during the whole service”.”

Before the phantom of False morning died,
Methought a Voice within the Tavern cried,
"When all the Temple is prepared within,
“Why nods the drowsy Worshipper outside?”

Not quite right here:

A butt was just another name for a barrel (The poet laureate in England traditionally receives a “butt of sack” — about 600 bottles’ worth of sherry, annually)

A scuttle was a hatch, probably from the Old French escoutille, meaning a hatchway.

Therefore a scuttlebut was a barrel with a hatch, the top or lid, open for scooping a drink from. They would not have damaged the barrel by punching a hole.

And of course “country” was a reference as well.

Ah, you mean a Furphy. From the portable water tanks used by Australian troops in WWI

The names of Ashtabula, Ohio and the Ashtabula River come from the Lenape phrase ash-tepi-hele meaning ‘always’ (ash) ‘enough’ (tepi) ‘to go around’ (hele), meaning the river always had enough fish for everyone to share.

The name of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania comes from Lenape punkwes-utenay ‘mosquito town’. The word for small biting insects, sandflies or mosquitoes, comes from a diminutive form of punkw meaning ‘dust’, which is also the source of the word punk (a stick of compressed wood dust).

The name of the Monongahela River comes from Lenape Menaonki-hela meaning ‘the high riverbanks are washed down; the banks cave in or erode’, from menaonke ‘it has a loose bank (where you might fall in)’ + -hele, a verb referring to any kind of motion (same as in *Ashtabula *above).

Indian place names were always practical like that, giving people an idea of what to expect if they went there.

Including those stinky fish-smelling Winnebago jagoffs . . .

I don’t think it’s from Portuguese. The word baau (包) means “wrap” or “package”, so I guess the buns got their name because of the way the dough is wrapped around the filling.

However, the Japanese word for bread, pan (パン) does come from the Portuguese pão.

Other Japanese words to come from Portuguese include: -

  • Cup / koppu (コップ) / copo
  • Button / botan (ボタン) / botão
  • Tobacco / tabako (タバコ) / tabaco

+10 for quoting one of Omar’s more obscure quatrains. :cool:

Okay, thanks.

The word noon derived from the Latin word none, for the ninth hour of the day.

But the ninth hour used to be around three pm, not twelve. The old system used to be the day started at dawn and was divided into twelve hours of daylight (which meant hours had a different length through the year). The middle of the day was sext - the sixth hour - not none, which was supposed to be three quarters of the way through the day.

What supposedly happened was that a lot of monasteries had a rule that the monks couldn’t eat before the ninth hour. But with clocks being only an approximation, there was a natural tendency to make an early estimate of when it was the ninth hour of the day. As time went on, the ninth hour bell that signaled meal time kept getting rung earlier and earlier in the day. So the joke arose that the none bell was signalling mid-day.

Dress comes from the same Latin word as direct.

*Diregere *in Latin means to set up something correctly, from dis- (‘apart’, originally ‘in two pieces’ because it’s related to the number two, like duo or di-) + *regere *(‘to guide, rule’, related to Latin rex and English right). I tend to make sense of the original meaning by thinking of building a house, which needs to begin with two parallel upright posts set up correctly, or a railroad made of two rails that have to be parallel with each other. At least I guess that’s the sense that was intended, in concrete terms. After that, it gets pretty abstract.

This garment I’m wearing that combines a skirt and bodice in one is a dress at the far end of one area of semantic development from diregere, meaning to clothe oneself properly. My dress is pretty far afield from the various senses of direct, like ‘straightaway; immediate/unmediated’ or ‘to guide the course of’ a project or movie, etc. A *director *provides direction, which also means a particular orientation like the compass points, or the orientation of any kind of movement, travel, or even thought. Then there’s dressage, to make a horse go correctly. *Diregere *‘to set up two things straight’ got so abstract that it has spawned vastly different semantic areas… in all different directions, one might say.

The town of Conneaut in the northeastern corner of Ohio, the Juniata River in central Pennsylvania, and the Oneida Nation of Indians in New York State all derive their names from the same Iroquoian root that means ‘standing stone’. Conneaut < g-anęyot, Juniata < onoyutta, and Oneida < onę’yote, all mean ‘standing stone’ in different Iroquoian languages. The Juniata tribe who lived on the Juniata River had a tall monolith inscribed with symbols set up at their sacred meeting ground in what is now Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. Before the place got renamed, it was known in English as Standing Stone, the literal meaning of the tribe’s name. When they had to leave and move west, they took their monolith with them; what became of it after that is unknown. Conneaut was once a general word for standing stones before it was used to name the town in Ohio. The Oneida people got that name from their origin legend, when their enemies could not find them because they’d become like standing stones.

I find Christian –> cretin somehow amusing.

[QUOTE=Search 'cretin' on etymonline]

cretin (n.)
1779, from French crétin (18c.), from Alpine dialect crestin, “a dwarfed and deformed idiot” of a type formerly found in families in the Alpine lands, a condition caused by a congenital deficiency of thyroid hormones, from Vulgar Latin *christianus “a Christian,” a generic term for “anyone,” but often with a sense of “poor fellow.”
[/QUOTE]

If we’re going to do “these words all ultimately come from the same root,” then the obvious example is “disk,” “disk,” “discus,” “dish,” “desk,” and “dais,” all of which come from the Greek “diskos.”

Hardly unexpected, though, I’d say.

I wrote:

> . . . example is “disk,” “disk,” “discus,” “dish,” “desk,” and “dais,” all of . . .

I meant:

> . . . example is “disc,” “disk,” “discus,” “dish,” “desk,” and “dais,” all of . . .

I don’t think so. It’s a New World animal that the ancient Romans could not have ever seen. It comes from Spanish jabalí, from Arabic jabali, meaning ‘of the mountains’ (jabal means ‘mountain’), i.e. ‘wild swine’. One of the many Arabic words in Spanish. Whereas *javelin *is from the French diminutive of the Old French word javelot, which came from ancient Celtic, cognate to Irish gabhal ‘fork, forked branch’.