etymythology

English

Etymology

Blend of etymology +‎ mythology. Though the term is modernly believed to be coined by linguist Laurence R. Horn in 2004, there are linguistic uses that go back to 1969 by Sean Valentine Golden.

Noun

etymythology (plural etymythologies)

1. A false etymology that has become widely disseminated and thus is commonly accepted as true; a folk etymology.
   • 1976, Sean Valentine Golden, Bygmythster Finnegan: Etymology As Poetics In the Works of James Joyce‎^[1], University of Connecticut:

     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.

   • 2005, Michael Quinion, Port Out, Starboard Home: The Fascinating Stories We Tell About the words We Use, Penguin Books Limited, page 8:

     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’.

   • 2006, Tope Omoniyi, Joshua A. Fishman, editors, Explorations in the Sociology of Language and Religion, John Benjamins Publishing Company, page 245:

     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).

   • 2014, Ghil‘ad Zuckermann, editor, Burning Issues in Afro-Asiatic Linguistics, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, page 277:

     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.

   • 2020, Ghil'ad Zuckermann, Revivalistics: From the Genesis of Israeli to Language Reclamation in Australia and Beyond, Oxford University Press, page 105:

     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).

   • 2008, Bill Brohaugh, Everything You Know About English Is Wrong, Sourcebooks, page 68:

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