Janelle’s Reviews > Useless Etymology: Offbeat Word Origins for Curious Minds > Status Update

The more you study etymology, linguistics, and the development of language, the more you realize that language is always changing. It does have rules of a sort—literally all languages do—but those rules evolve, so I’ve found that being prescriptive about colloquialisms and emerging language patterns isn’t productive.The rules were meant to be broken.Wordplay is as old as language itself.

The word “avocado” journeyed into English from the Aztec language Nahuatl. In addition to being a word for the fruit, the original word ahuakatl/aˉhuacatl also meant “testicle,” because avocados were thought to look a lot like wrinkly dangly balls.

This one sounds far too fanciful to be true, but I assure you it is an eponym: Sideburns are named after the resplendent and voluminous whiskers of Union Civil War general Ambrose E. Burnside. Starting around the 1870s, they were called “burnsides,” but shortly thereafter, the words were transposed.

The word meme is modeled after the word “gene” because of the way memes spread and evolve. It was coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.

…from the Arabic mata “he died,” which also appears in the phrase shah mat “the king died”—the source of the word “checkmate,” after some folk etymology adaptations to English spelling.

..River Avon”means“River River”because“Avon”comes from a Welsh word for river,&..Connecticut River is similarly pleonastic because “Connecticut”is from a Mohican word meaning“at the long tidal river.” ..the Sahara Desert(Sahara is a transliteration of the Arabic word for“desert”—thus,the “desert desert”)&the Faroe Islands(from the Faroese word Føroyar,which already means“sheep island”—thus,the“sheep island islands”)

A similar example of a geographical kadigan is “the boondocks” or, in short, “the boonies” as a word for a rural area. It’s from the Tagalog word bundok, meaning “mountain,” which American soldiers borrowed while stationed in the Philippines as a word meaning “a wild, remote place.”

In Middle English, island was spelled yland.The root of the first part of the word means “water,” so island literally means “water-land”..It does not share a root with the word isle, which is from Old French and ultimately from the Latin insula. But people assumed, based on pronunciation and the overlap in meaning, that yland and isle were related, and so they essentially became a portmanteau in the form of “island.”

…But feist as a word for a small dog is a shortened version of the Middle English phrase fysting curre—that is, feisting cur.A cur is a dog, and “fysting” meant “stinking” but literally “farting” or “breaking wind.”Thus, to be feisty is to be like a stinky, farty little mutt dog.