10 examples of folk etymology words

Linguistics, Folk Etymology

LIN203H1F: Assignment 2 Due: Thursday, December 5, 2019, at the very beginning of the lecture (6:10 PM).

Total

10 points

Caution

Instructions are meant to outline your task for this assignment and to provide you with context;

material and wording from these instructions are NOT to be included, reproduced,

paraphrased, etc. in your assignment.

Instructions

An urban legend is a commonly-believed but uncited story about history, medicine,

psychology, technology, anything. Many urban legends are untrue (or outdated), but they have

an ability to persist through oral transmission. One area in which urban legends abound is

etymology.

Common but unfounded beliefs about where words or phrases come from are called false

etymologies. Many of them are about words that are supposedly initialisms/acronyms. For

instance, the word news for ‘current events being reported on’ is simply an extension of the

adjective new, inspired by the French nouvelles (Oxford English Dictionary, ‘news, n.’). But there

is a common untrue belief that news supposedly comes from the first letters of the points of the

compass (N, E, S, W) with the order slightly altered. There is no reason to believe this, but it

strikes people as interesting and convincing, so it continues to be disseminated. Just this past

summer, your professor saw this ‘fact’ painted on the wall of a newsstand in an airport in the

United States!

But false etymologies have a greater power than this. Sometimes a mistaken belief about a word

or phrase’s history causes it to be changed over time. When this happens, it is called a folk

etymology. Consider the word hangnail. It sounds as if it must have been created because part

of the skin/nail is hanging off. However, this appears to be a folk etymology that has reshaped

the spelling. The word was probably originally angnail or agnail, meaning ‘painful nail’, which

would be cognate with angst, anger, anxiety, and anguish (Oxford English Dictionary, ‘agnail, n.’).

Your task: Imagine that you are writing a blog post about folk etymologies. It can be very

informal, but should explain the technical concepts straightforwardly (as if you are addressing

people who have never taken a linguistics class). For an example of the tone, see Asya

Pereltsvaig’s blog, e.g.: https://www.languagesoftheworld.info/morphology/some-observations-

on-morphophonological-adaptation-of-english-derived-loanwords-in-russian-slang.html

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You will be finding some examples of folk etymology in the online Oxford English Dictionary

and using them to address two or more of these questions:

1. Why are words susceptible to false etymologies and folk etymologies over time? Is there

a general point at which this kind of retrospective accidental semantic change becomes

possible?

2. Are there circumstances that make it more likely that word A is more likely to attract

false etymology and/or folk etymology than word B?

3. Folk etymology is a legitimate form of language change that is seen across languages

and cultures. What is it about language (or the relationship of language to the general

public) that allows for the possibility so often?

In introducing the topic, you can draw on (and then cite!) information either this assignment or

the textbook (Denning et al. 2007:65 – though note that they include back-formation under folk

etymology), or other sources.

In your answer, you will need to use at least five examples of folk etymology from the OED,

and you need to cite (and reference) the OED entries as below. It is not enough to say e.g.

“hangnail is a folk etymology (Oxford English Dictionary, ‘agnail, n.’). You can be concise, but

you need to explain the details – how is it a folk etymology? Where did the word come from,

etymologically, and how was it reinterpreted? How does that connect to your answers to the

questions above?

To find your examples: first, access the Oxford English Dictionary with your U of T access:

1. Go to library.utoronto.ca.

2. Either use the search box, or navigate the Databases page. Either way, find the link to

the “Oxford English Dictionary [electronic resource]” in Journals and Databases.

3. Click on it.

4. Click on “Oxford English Dictionary, 2000 to present”.

5. You might be asked to log into the U of T Library page if you are off-campus.

6. Once you see the OED homepage (“Welcome to the definitive record of the English

language”), you are in!

Now you’re going to explore some examples of folk etymologies! To do this:

1. Underneath the Quick Search bar, click on Advanced search.

2. Click the first drop-down menu and select Etymology to make sure that you are

searching inside the etymological background of words, as below.

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3. Type folk etymology inside the search box. Important: do not use quotation marks!

4. Press enter. You should get a list of about 200 words/phrases.

5. Explore this list. Open some of the words and read the ‘Etymology’ section (you may

need to click ‘Show more’ to see all of it). Don’t just use the words beginning in A! Let

your curiosity guide you here.

References

You do not have to cite these specific words unless you use them in your essay. However, you

need to cite all of the entries for the examples you employ, as well as any other sources you

draw on.

Oxford English Dictionary. "agnail, n." Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University

Press, September 2019.

Oxford English Dictionary. "news, n." Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University

Press, September 2019.

Formatting

Your assignment should be 2-3 pages in length (but you can add a fourth page for the

bibliography if you need to) with the text double-spaced (or 1.5 spaced) in an ordinary 12-point

font and with 1” margins. You must submit your paper via Quercus by the beginning of the

lecture (6:10 PM Toronto time) on Thursday, December 5.

Buying essays from anyone else is not permitted. Do not share your work with any of your

classmates, or accept any offers to look at classmates’ or anyone else’s attempts at the problem.

You can always send me an email and/or set up an appointment and/or visit my office hours if

you are having problems – that’s my job!

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Using sources

In this assignment, you need to rely on the Oxford English Dictionary, and if you want, you can

also use the textbook and/or the lecture slides and/or additional sources of your choosing. If use

these or any other sources, you must either:

a) paraphrase the idea (in your own words), put in a citation in a bracket immediately

afterwards, and put the source in a references list at the end; or:

b) use the exact words from the source inside quotation marks, put in a citation in a

bracket immediately afterwards, and put the source in a references list at the end.

A citation of the lecture slides can simply look like "(Lecture 1)" and citing the textbook as

"Denning et al. 2007:16)", where the number after the : is the page number, is also enough.

You can use any kind of established style/formatting for citations and references (most

linguistics journals have their own conventions!), as long as you are consistent and have

provided all the details a reader needs to look up the source. Possible entries for references list:

Denning, Keith, Brett Kessler, and William R. Leben (2007). English Vocabulary Elements (2nd

edition). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lecture 1. LIN203: English Words (instructor: Marisa Brook). University of Toronto, St.

George campus. September 9, 2019.

NOTE: the suggested word-counts are just guidelines for the amount of writing expected: you

do not need to declare the number of words you wrote, or worry about deleting a few if your

total is 210 rather than 200.

NOTE: again, you are not permitted to use the exact wording from this assignment. If you

must quote it, use quotation marks and also put in both a citation and a reference to it.