Meaning of etymythology | Babel Free

Definitions

A false etymology that has become widely disseminated and thus is commonly accepted as true; a folk etymology.

Examples

“The basic element which transforms names and placenames into narratives or narrative details is the pun. I call this process etymythology. and I show how James Joyce's knowledge of Irish onomastic and toponomastic tales, and his interest in the process which created them, was bolstered by his early study of the developing science of etymology, […] to the point where etymythology as poetics became one of Joyce's own methods of composition, an element of his own poetics.”

“There are two specific kinds of etymythology that continually recur. One argues that a given word has been created as an acronym, from the initial letters of a phrase. This is a common suggestion, for words as widely differentiated as cop, ‘Constable On Patrol’, FUCK, supposedly ‘Fornication Under Consent of the King’, POSH, ‘Port Out, Starboard Home’ (from sailing-ship days), or TIP, money given to a waiter ‘To Insure Promptness’.”

“Many Israelis are certain that he is ‘Dr Horse’ since Israeli סוּס sus means ‘horse’. I have heard an etymythology that this arises from the prevalence of animals in Dr Seuss’s stories. This ‘misunderstanding’ might correspond to Haugen’s general claim with regard to borrowing, that “every speaker attempts to reproduce previously learned linguistic patterns in an effort to cope with new linguistic situations’ (1950:212).”

“The Internet is simply a far more efficient etymythology tool than its predecessors.”

“Clearly a favourable factor, for the quality of the etymythology about Tokyo, is that in the Hebrew Bible there is indeed a place-name derived from the Hebrew verb תָּקַע taká.”

“The linguistic analysis of etymythology should not restrict itself to Derivational Only Popular Etymology (DOPE), i.e. cases of mistaken derivation, because etymythology often results in a new sense/lexical item such as phono-semantic matches (see Zuckermann 2003).”

CEFR level