Folk Etymology

Etymology is the study of the origins of words, a fascinating, complex, but often frustrating discipline. Folk etymology is the phenomenon whereby plausible but factually inaccurate explanations develop, often accompanied by a corroborating tall story. These colorful explanations result from various popular notions and expectations, namely that all words have specific origins and that these root meanings are the key to the words in question.

As their name implies, folk etymologies are collective and spontaneous. They commonly involve not only explanations of the origins of words but also alterations in the form of words to suggest their origin. In the process, the actual origin of the word is, ironically, obscured. Thus cockroach is a corruption of the original Spanish form cucaracha , and the entry for women, stereotypes of shows that the base word woman has generated several misogynist folk etymologies with word play on “woe.” Two prime examples are bloody , popularly derived from the archaic phrase “by our lady!,” and crap , ascribed to Dr. Thomas Crapper. Even lexicographers have occasionally blundered into folk etymology. Both Dr. Johnson (1755) and Francis Grose (1785) erroneously derived nickname from French nom de nique . Stuart Berg Flexner retails a fanciful derivation explaining the origin of Honky from white men honking the horns of their cars when picking up black girlfriends (1980, 58). Antony Burgess likewise ascribes Old Nick , the euphemism for the Devil, to Niccolò Machiavelli in a book on Shakespeare, although the title is recorded only from about 1643 (1972, 103).

Most people are especially curious about the origins of the “four-letter” words. Since most have problematic origins, they naturally attract folk etymologies. Two ingenious explanations of the origin of fuck claim that the term was originally an acronym, deriving from a royal edict issued during the Plague: “fornicate under command of the King,” alternatively from a police formula, “for unlawful carnal knowledge.” A moment’s reflection will usually question such explanations. Why so natural a process as procreation should require a royal command, and why the injunction should be issued in such an arcane form, are only two of the more obvious objections. The notoriously decadent King Charles II (1661–1685) would more likely have echoed King Lear’s lascivious edict: “Let copulation thrive!” (IV vi 117). Nor is there any obvious reason why the police should resort to such a coded reference. More significantly, both explanations come well after the first appearance of the word fuck (ca. 1503), and are thus anachronistic.

Wop , discussed under Italians, has a well-attested origin, but folk etymologies claim that the word is also an acronym, derived from an immigration category WithOut Passport or WithOut Papers. Irving Lewis Allen has pointed out two obvious logical objections to these etymologies: “First, all immigrants without documentation would have been nicknamed the same, but Italians were the only immigrant group in the 1890s and later who were called wops . Secondly, the nickname emerged in American slang … before acronyms came into wide use in government bureaucracies” (1983, 119). Nevertheless, such explanations typically retain credibility. In 1977 no fewer than 228 readers sent the “WithOut Papers” explanation to a syndicated columnist, Dr. Max Rafferty (Eisiminger 1978, 582). Clearly these folk etymologies serve to strengthen the negative stereotype of Italians being illegal immigrants, like the explicit term wetback for a Mexican.

Folk etymologies are remarkably tenacious and continue to thrive, defying logical or historical refutation. Thus the relationship between etymology and folk etymology is similar to that between astronomy and astrology: the first is a science often yielding complex results unsatisfying to human curiosity; the second is a pseudo-science fed by popular expectations and folklore. Astrology continues to thrive despite being discredited. The continuing phenomenon of folk etymology suggests that the speech community prefers attractive fiction to cold fact in etymology as in other areas.