The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language by Mark Forsyth Read Free Book Online Page A

from then on a sideling became somebody who sidled . These days there aren’t nearly as many lords and servant boys and so sideling itself has vanished. People still sidle around and sidle up to each other, but they are able to do so only because of a mistake of folk etymology and the backformation of a new word.
    Another common form of folk etymology happens when people alter the spelling of strange or unfamiliar words so that they appear to make more sense. For example, there’s a drowsy little rodent that the French therefore used to call a dormeuse , which meant she who sleeps . In English we call the same creature a dormouse . That’s despite the fact that it isn’t a mouse and has no particular affinity for doors. The reason is that the English had field mice and town mice and so they were, of course, going to look at the word dormeuse and conclude that someone just didn’t know how to spell.
    The same principle applies to fairies, or rather to the disappearance of fairies. Once upon a time, belief in fairies was commonplace. They lived not at the bottom of the garden, but in the woods, where they would play all sorts of mysterious games. They would milk people’s cattle in the night, or hide in flowers and under trees, and generally do the sorts of things that would get you or me arrested. They were known as the Folks. When it was cold the Folks liked to wear gloves, which is why there is, or used to be, a flower called a folks’ glove .
    But the fairies have all died (or maybe just got better at hiding) and people stopped referring to them as Folks many years ago, which is why the name folks’ glove became rather peculiar. Then some clever fellow decided that they weren’t folks’ gloves after all, they must be foxgloves because foxes have such dinky little feet, and the error set in. They are foxgloves now, and foxgloves they will remain, until somebody makes a better mistake.
    By the same system, the old word crevis is now spelled and pronounced crayfish , even though it’s not very fishlike. The Spanish cucaracha became a cockroach , and most wonderfully of all, the Indian mangus became a mongoose , although there’s not a huge similarity between the furry, snake-devouring mammal and a goose.
    An exception to these folk etymologies is the butterfly . Butterflies do have something to do with butter, although nobody is quite sure what. They like to flutter around milk pails and butter churns, which might explain it. Many butterflies are yellow, which would be a good reason for the name. But there’s another, more troubling possibility: butterflies, like the rest of us, are subject to the call of the lavatory, and butterfly poo is yellow, just like butter.
    Now, you may ask yourself, what sort of person goes around peering at butterfly poo and then naming an insect after it? The answer, it would appear, is that Dutch people do that. Or at least, an old Dutch word for butterfly was boterschijte .
    Of course, you may dismiss that last theory as poppycock, but if you do, please remember that poppycock comes from the Dutch pappe-cack , meaning soft shit .
    Before the next link, can you guess what butterflies have to do with psychiatry and pasta?

Butterflies of the World
    For some reason the languages of the world put more effort into the names of butterflies than those of any other creature. From Norway to Malaysia the words are extraordinary.
    Malay doesn’t have plurals like ours. In English you simply add an S to the end of the word. But in Malay you form your plural by repeating the noun, so tables would become table table . It’s a system with some sort of logic to it. When there’s more than one word, that means there’s more than one thing.
    It works out fine for the speaker of Malay, so long as the original singular noun wasn’t formed by reduplication itself, as is the case with their butterflies. The Malay for butterfly is rama-rama , so butterflies is rama-rama rama-rama. And it doesn’t stop