Or maybe today I'm just super pissy

[conuly]

because I'm also thinking "Instead of going 'I'm not sure, but I think $FACTOID', why not just spend a full minute googling first to see if it's true?" This goes double for etymologies - you might not have had an encyclopedia in your house before the internet, but there's a good chance you at least had access to a dictionary. Instead of passing around some maybe-fact for 20 plus years, with a silly disclaimer, just look the damn thing up already and take responsibility for preventing the spread of misinformation. "I think I was told that woman means womb-man!" No, it damn well doesn't, and I am not the bad guy here for telling you. I'm keeping you from embarrassing yourself for the next 20 years.

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

This is another facet of that thing I wrote about yesterday, people want words to have deep and fundamental meanings. A lot of languages have much less opaque vocabulary than English so maybe we're more prone to expecting our words to be exciting little trivia nuggets becuase occasionally they are, and sometimes it's delightful to realize connections between words that don't seem related. But we way overdo that.

I've had to study Old English to know that "woman" has an unremarkable history and always meant merely what it means today, and no more. So I think people who lack that kind of knowledge are just desperate for there to be something a bit elevated and secret there for them to go "ah, you see, this makes whatever point I want to make!"

[conuly]

Yeah, but word origins aren't that obscure! They're in the dictionary.

[cosmolinguist]

Oh I totally agree, there's no reason for this. It's a shame people prefer just-so stories to, y'know, actual facts.

[hudebnik]

It's a time-honored tradition: take a look at Isadore's Etymologies for page after page of word etymologies that would be really cool and interesting if there were any shred of evidence they were true. To be fair, Isadore didn't have a dictionary, much less Google.