bad-etymology

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whereas pounds are abbreviated as lbs because in cooking, where the unit was first used, one pound is a lotta butter, son

ml is short for milliliters.

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ml is short for milliliters.

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The word Halloween refers to the ancient tradition that consisted in standing side by side forming two lines along the sides of a hall and at a given signal that varied with the local tradition everyone would pull their weiner out. There are many theories on how this evolved into the festivity we have today, but no agreement has been reached due to doubts on whether this was the trick or the treat.

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Fasting is not eating food and feasting is eating lots of food because food is represented by the letter e since it looks like a little ice cream cone.

e was since replaced by the word food since the advent of uppercase letters eliminated the resemblance and by that time the Food Or Opiates Department (old name of the FDA) already had to approve something for it to be labeled safe for eating, so everything you ate, hopefully, was FOOD approved - or, later, just FOOD.

Still, e's legacy remains in words like ego - as in, what you have when e (food) goes into the mouth.

Because, of course, you're not you when you're hungry.

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Close but no cigar! It’s actually about how, when girls enter their first phases of independence, they start listening to indie music and wearing pendants - hence indiependants, whose spelling evolved since.

oooooh its called being "Independant" because it feels like you are all alone, cut off from the world by the curse

trapped "In De Pendant"

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In the olden days, when tasked with decorating and accessorizing, the artisans of their respective fields would be known for their goal to make the item “fo’ real ill” - but ever since “fo’ real” got abbreviated to fr to avoid confusion during Pharrell’s rise to fame the expression has become “fr ill”, which has since grown to become synonymous with the embellishments created to that end.

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thousands of dedicated bad-etymology fans: *hold their breath in tense excitement as they hold metaphorical and sometimes literal microphones to our face* bad-etymology.tumblr.com: it's called bride cause u b riding her

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“leaves are called as much because if one falls it leaves”, I could tell you, but won’t, because then you’d ask “ok, but where does the word leaves come from” and I’d have to tell you “it comes from the old legend that when people died they turned into a weird form of leaves, and thus that some of the leaves you’d see in fall were actually corpses - this belief being abandoned after it turned out to scare kids and be horseshit”, and then you’d ask “ok, but where does the word leaves come from” and I’d have to tell you I already told you and you’d feel so embarrassed you’d think to ask me where the word fall comes from to change the subject and I’d tell you “from Latin autumnus” and you’d be too self-conscious to question that

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*takes off shirt and whips it around*

"Irish doesn't have a word for please, you have to say if it be your will" buddy do I have news for you about "please"

"Irish doesn't have a word for hello you have to use a shorthand religious blessing" buddy do I have news for you about "goodbye"!

"In Polish the word for car is that which walks by itself" BUDDY what do you think an AUTOMOBILE is?

you have got to understand that your mother tongue is not the model of language. all your words have secret histories and layers of meaning just the same as other people's words. the word you think of as just a word has etymology, it wasn't handed down from God as a finished word. English doesn't have a word for movie you have to either refer to the recording medium or use a short version of "moving picture", isn't that cute?

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This account was, is, and will be a barren desert for extended periods at a time. But in those periods of abandon it always stays fully operational, ready to be used again. Now, if you can appreciate what an annoyance the opposite would be in an outlet for quality educational content, you’re sure to understand how big an impact it could have to lose that dependability in, say, your water source. In both cases, we should not take what we have for granted, and be ready to defend and protect it, just like with rights - and when a right or a privilege depends on infrastructure, we need to support its upkeep, directly or less - because it really can just go away just like it came.

Because remember, even something as basic as water availability was not guaranteed through history, and, like most things not guaranteed through history, it’s not guaranteed everywhere in the world today. So remember that you have what you do because when water sources were poorly people took care to overhaul them, one by one, telling them apart by their state and considering a “poorly” the village’s top priority, until they were erased from public memory and every one left was, as they still are today… a “well”.

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Many assume “New Year’s Eve” to be short for “Evening”, as in “the evening of the new year”. This is not only false, but also bafflingly stupid, as the evening is still of the old year, and only half the night belongs to the new one. In fact, originally, the time and associated parties were just called New Year, or New Year’s party. But then how did we get to calling it New Year’s Eve?

You see, New Year’s Eve parties usually had plenty fireworks, but down the line these got banned over concern for the many animals they distress (which later down the line got reversed for much the same reason environmental regulations get cut, i.e. people being dumb).

This meant that, unless your fireworks did distress animals, cops were likely not to bother. But of course, if they caught wind of your intention to fire them, you would face trouble.

Thus many chose to hold their parties in areas far from any animal and fire them anyway, but since they couldn’t state this in their invites, they merely expressed this through an ante-litteram emoticon of a face looking upwards, at the sky.

The tradition stuck, as they always do, and when along with typewriters came the need to use letters to make it, the eyes were made with es (so much so that they were named after it, thus the word “eye”) and the mouth with a v.

So, the next late December, greet your friends with a proper invite and ask them to join you for the New Year! eve

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You may ask yourself why I am posting about New Year’s Eve in July. You see, the explanation is pretty simple - I’d posted this at the right time, but on the wrong blog by accident. To ease my embarrassment, I’ll just remember that the origin of the word in question (not post - that one is pretty boring, being derived from posting a sign being an action similar to sticking a Post-It - but accident) was much more brutal, referring to the damage caused by lumberjacks from their swings or falling trees, which spawned the saying “there’s a dent for every axe” that meant their every mishap became referred to as “an axe, a dent”.

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We here at Bad Etymology obviously love language quirks and nuances, and thus are fascinated by anything lost in translation.

So today, we’ll be discussing something even more interesting and in-keeping with our theme, insofar as it’s a word that was found in translation.

You see, much like the color orange had no name of its own, being considered a shade of red until it took the name of the fruit that sported it, some things are considered alternative versions of another thing or just have never been named themselves. But, as you can imagine, this can cause troubles when interacting with languages that do have names for them.

Such was the situation of a young translator between English and Italian, that, when translating a book into English, was stumped by the word “lumaca”. So, like we’d all do, asked a native speaker passing by about the word, whom unfortunately, in unawareness, gave him its figurative meaning of “someone slow/reticent to get off their ass”. Now, the definition made no sense in context, but the native, in a hurry, was already away, so the best that could be done was to jot something down and correct it later on. This took the form of an Englishization of the Italian term associated with getting off one’s ass, “schiodarsi”, a figurative use of a verb composed of the prefix s-, sometimes es-, that relative to a verb denotes its opposite, and the noun “chiodo”, which means nail.

Thus the word for “lumaca” got jotted down as “snail”.

As you can imagine, it never did get corrected, and as such got spread around by the book’s readers, who assumed the name always existed and they’d just never known. Which is obviously very easy to laugh at, but ask yourself: how many words you learned on social media did you actually question and look up? Now, imagine how likely that would be back when people could actually trust their information to have come from people knowing their shit.

Now, you may imagine that’d be the only entomology-related word that came from an error, but this’d be an error itself: the word itself comes from one. More specifically, the first book on the topic having been labeled as an etymology book (you can’t really blame them, the actual science didn’t exist yet!). Angry at this mislabeling, the author got ahold of all the copies printed and angrily scribbled “NO” on all the covers, which however only had the effect of making the science known as “eNtOmology” when they were sold anyway.

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The reason the act of catfishing is called catfishing is because the first ones to do it were catfishes, who felt no human would have accepted them as they were. So remember to accept and cherish our differences!

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The word “pun” is actually a truncation of the word “punch”, from what it’s meant to cause before you’ve even finished it.

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Fencing, when the word originated, wasn’t actually done with swords, as folks were too broke for that. Instead, they used the closest-looking thing: planks from a fence.

The rest is history.

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A long time ago, dogs weren’t the cute little domesticated things that we know today, but wild, savage beasts, and thus were appropriately named “roar” (they only became “dogs” far later on, when someone noticed a dachsund’s resemblance to a hot dog)

The word “uproar”, in fact, is a metonymy that comes from the reaction caused by offhandedly mentioning the yet-meaningless name and answering to the subsequent question "What's 'uproar'?" with “not much hbu”

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Of course, the implication that the name of the cousin comes from this is false:

It is the skateboarding cousin who inspired the name.

Throckmorton