The Etymologicon

Argon, the other major gas in air, wasn’t known about at the time, because it’s an inert gas and doesn’t produce anything at all. That’s why it’s called argon. Argon is Greek for lazy.

Being a scientist, he of course dressed this up in Greek, and the Greek for water producer is hydro-gen. The bit of air that made things acidic he decided to call the acid-maker or oxy-gen, and the one that produced nitre then got called nitro-gen.

And then he grew bigger than any of us, because, since the phrase was invented in 1941, we have all become part of the gene pool, which, etymologically, means that we are all little bits of chicken.

Pooling your money began in France, and has nothing whatsoever to do with swimming pools, and a lot to do with chickens and genetics.

So it was Carl and not Sigmund who decided that a psychological problem should be called a complex. Then he thought up introverts and extroverts, and finally, realising that naming was a doddle, he invented synchronicity and ambivalent. And with that he sat down to rest

Analysis is Greek for release. So Freud’s new art would be, literally, the liberation of the butterfly. How pretty! Fr

This was the belief of the Maoris, and of the Aztecs in whose mythology Itzpapalotl was the goddess of the Obsidian Butterfly: a soul encased in stone who could be freed only by another tongue-twisting god called Tezcatlipoca.

There also seems to have been a ghost of this belief among the ancient Greeks. The Greek for butterfly was psyche, and Psyche was the goddess of the soul.

Malays also repeat verbs to intensify them, so I really like would be rendered as I like like, or suka suka.

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.

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.