folk etymology

While today, in possession of a formerly unprecedented amount of manuscript and epigraphic material, we take pride in correcting obsolete understandings and folk etymologies regarding the composition of characters (e.g., the huiyi category), it is important to realize that these historically "incorrect" notions of character structure were often responsible for the structure of popular character forms.

For instance, noting that travail meaning "work" came originally from trepalium, which named an instrument of torture, he does not follow the available trail of evidence from torture through hardship to toil and thence to work, but simply says, "fear of the trepalium must have served as an incentive to work harder, because the French took this word and Frenchified it as travail'.' Now, Richler may have been exercising dry wit there, but if so, he should have been more overt about it; as he knows, jokes about etymology can be taken as the truth--he himself puts paid to silly folk etymologies for "golf," "OK," "loo" and a very popular vulgarity.

He debunks popular "folk etymologies" that attempt to account for certain words, but which are in fact fabrications or urban legends.

Kroeber, for example, had a low tolerance for folk etymologies and poor scholarship on the subject, especially when it came to explaining the origins of California place names.

He eventually attained this recognition with the general reading public for the humor and raciness of his stories and for his remarkable prose, which is full of puns, colloquial expressions, folk etymologies, and neologisms.