Dubious, but hilarious. The town name ‘Baldock’ is apparently a corruption of ‘Baghdad’, and the result of exotically-minded Knights Templar settling there in the 12th century. Then ‘catamite’, a word which seems to be cropping up everywhere in my set texts, is derived from Ganymede. Ganymede? Catamite? There’s an intermediate latin stage of Catamus, but that doesn’t really explain it.
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Are we sharing favourite etymological twists? If so, mine is an obvious one for these pages - governor and cybernetics, for obvious conceptual reasons but opaque phonetic ones, come from the Greek kubernetes “steersman,” perhaps based on 1830s Fr.ench cybernétique “the art of governing.”
Actually, the phonetics aren’t that opaque: apparently governor in English comes from the Greek via Latin then French - “the -k- to -g- sound shift is perhaps via the medium of Etruscan”, while Norbert Wiener’s neologism just short-cuts back to the Greek. Duh.
Comment by Mike — February 25, 2005 @ 11:06 am