Still another example is the verb to mix. Latin miscere meant to mingle or blend; see miscellaneous below for more relatives. The past participle in Latin was mixtus, presumably because "misctus" was too difficult to pronounce, and this led to a French adjective mixte, mingled, which became a Law French word in the English courts to describe, for example, a case which had both a criminal and civil element. This looked like it ought to be spelled "mixed" and be from a non-existent verb "to mix", and so it came to pass.
[06Sep08] Time to mention Law French. The Normans were all bilingual within a generation or two of arriving in England. Indeed, by maybe 1200 French became a learned second language, with English as the mother tongue even for the nobility. The legal system, however, still used French exclusively until 1362, when it was ordered that pleadings would henceforth be in English. Court proceedings were still written in French, however, until the 17th century. Since those documents are what historians have to work with, all our knowledge of English Law for 600 years was written in French, although it had drifted into a form of French far removed from that used in France.
See below for how grid is a back-formation from gridiron rather than vice versa. Similarly, char (to burn) is a back-formation from charcoal, where the first syllable is "carbon".
[27Sep08] Pasta carbonara is only indirectly a "carbon" word. It means "charcoal-burner" in Italian, but the bacon, egg, and cream sauce isn't named because it was a favorite dish of that profession, but because "Carbonara" was the name of a Roman restaurant that featured the dish. C.f. porterhouse steak, Delmonico steak, toll house cookies, etc.
Taxi is a back-formation from "taximeter cab". The tax- root means to charge or assess, most obviously in tax, taxation, and the taxing effort that takes a lot out of one. The "taximeter" both measures and computes a charge for time and distance, while a taxi-dancer is a professional dancer who charges by the dance. (A cab in turn is shortened down from cabriolet, a light bouncy vehicle likened to a goat, so it's a cousin of caprice, caper, and Capricorn.) PS — the original "assess" or "judge" sense of "tax" means that taste is the same word, and so is task, whose original meaning was an assessment. C.f. the double sense of duty — a job and a customs tax.
Tax vs task is an example of a process called metathesis, the transposition of sounds within a word. Other prominent examples are curd, which is the same word as crud, "aks" and "purty" as the vulgar pronunciations of ask and pretty, and Dubya's nukular for nuclear. Some switches have become standard: wasp for the original waps and bird for bryd, for example.
Roach is a back-formation from cockroach, which as mentioned elsewhere is in its turn folk-etymology for Spanish cucaracha.
greed is from greedy and not the other way around; the original noun was "greediness".
The adjective swashbuckling is a mistake. Originally, a swash-buckler was a braggart, from swash to strike, and buckler, a small shield, from Latin buccalarius. A swash-buckler was someone who went into battle beating his sword against his shield for maximum effect. "Buckler" was mis-interpreted as a verb instead of a noun, leading to the incorrect verb to swashbuckle instead of to swashbuckler.
The verb to shimmy, shake violently, is derived from the energetic dance of the same name, popular around 1920 — c.f. "I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate". That started out as a vulgar "shake the shimmy", i.e., chemise. (Shimmy had been American slang for the article of dress from about 1840.) Thus, everything goes back to Latin camisia, a shirt, which also gave camisole.
Diddle, to deceive or cheat, is a back-formation from Jeremy Diddler, a character in an 1803 farce called Raising the Wind. He was a rogue who was always borrowing money and "forgetting" to repay. It is barely possible that the character's name was picked because of a vague connection to Old English dydrian, to delude, but the modern use is certainly due to the popularity of the play.
[17Feb06] Nothing could be more obvious than the city of Cambridge, England being named for a bridge over the River Cam. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work that way. The river's real name is the Granta, and the Old English name of the town was Grantabrygge. This got modified over time to Cantabridge — c.f. the Latin name, still used in various university contexts, which is Cantabrigia. This was eventually whittled down to Cambridge, at which point some logical souls decided that it was necessary to rename the river to match the town! In reality, it is called the Cam only inside the city; above and below it is still the Granta, and just upstream it flows through the town of Grantchester. I suppose that for many centuries it has been a source of satisfaction to the faculty and students of Cambridge that at least they rated a bridge, while the inferior residents of Oxford had to wade with the cows.
Completely off the subject, the use of pedestrian to mean "common" or "average" looks like it should be a metaphor from the "walker" sense, but it's the other way around. The literal meaning of pedestrian is "heavy-footed" or "slogging", and it was first applied to a plodding literary style. The application to anyone walking on the street or sidewalk, even if quite nimbly, was a kind of joke a hundred years later.
Getting back to the original subject, another example of suspect literacy came in a certain American city where the mayor fired a subordinate for describing a budget proposal as niggardly. His Honor couldn't be convinced that there was no racial slur involved. Nigger, like Negro, is a member of the Latin niger- (black) family of words, while niggardly is from a Germanic nig- root that has never meant anything else but stingy or picky. People who are obsessed about insignificant details are described as niggling.
Much as I'd like it if the above paragraphs were fiction, they are fact, and here's another example of wonderful reading skills, also from the United States. A group of teenagers in an upstate New York town were convicted of arson for setting a fire that destroyed the Gobind Sadan Sikh temple. Their defense in court was that they thought the name was "Go Bin Laden" and that it was their patriotic duty to burn it down. (Several Sikhs in the United States were assaulted or even murdered in the hysteria following the attack on the World Trade Center, since their turbans and beards made them stand out as "obvious" Arabs.)
The "Bin" in the terrorist's name is the same as the Hebrew "Ben" in surnames like David Ben Gurion or Judah Ben Hur — it's Semitic for "son of". Benjamin means "son of the right hand" in Hebrew. C.f. B'nai B'rith, Sons of the Covenant. Semitic forms feminine nouns by adding /T/, so the words for "daughter" are respectively Arabic bint (used in English slang as a more or less sarcastic equivalent of "broad") and Hebrew bat as in Bat Mitzvah and Bathsheba.
Before leaving the subject of arson, most readers probably will not be extremely shocked to learn the word is related to ash and arid, from a root that means to burn. Slightly less obvious are ardor and ardent, "burning" with passion, but there is quite a jump to azalea. That's from the Greek word for "dry", because the plant prefers dry sandy soil. Incidentally, Latin ara means "altar", from the sacrifices burned thereon, and as mentioned elsewhere, Ara is the name of a southern constellation.
We few, we happy few, we Band of Brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition.(Vile in that sense simply means "low-born"; the general meaning is "common" or "cheap"; the root is also in revile and vilify. There's no relation to "villain", though. As mentioned elsewhere, villains lived on villas or in villages.)
Some etymologists think that the "tribe" or "stock" sense of race and its adjective racial are related to Rastafarianism. The former is definitely from Spanish raza, and one theory is that this is Arabic ras, head, picked up from the Moors. In any case, "ras" meant "prince" in Ethiopian (another Semitic language), and Ras Tafari was the Ethiopian title of Haile Selassie before he became emperor. Other derivatives are Arabic reis, captain or chief, and Hebrew Rosh Hashanah, literally "head of the year", i.e., New Year's Day.
Slightly less obvious is the brown family, including bear, beaver, burnish, bruin, Bjorn, Bruno, Bernard, berserk, and brunette. [01Jan08] Keltic bel- means "shining" — Beltane featured a bale-fire or bonfire and the Baltic is probably the "shining" sea. In Slavic the root means "white" (Belgrade, beluga, Belarus). The original meaning of bland, blind, blemish, and blend was "make pale".
In Greek and Latin, that "BH-" normally turned into an /F/ sound, so the tribe also includes Latin flame, flare, flagrant, conflagration, inflammable, and Greek phlox, a spectacularly "flaming" bloom. Phlegm was originally thought to cause a fever, and in chemical terms derived from modern Latin, flavo- means "yellow"! Note that Germanic fire itself is not related — it is from an ie pur- root that by Grimm's Law also is responsible for Greek pyre, pyromaniac, etc.
Flamingo certainly looks like it's a "flame" word, but it isn't. Flamingoes are not flame-colored, and in fact the word is the Spanish form of Fleming (a resident of Flanders), in allusion to the bright pink complexion of the Dutchmen, at least as seen by the Spanish. Flamenco is the actual Spanish form of the word; it was applied to a dancing style because Flamenco was a Spanish word for Gypsy. C.f. Bohemian, Gitano (Egyptian), and Gypsy itself for other fanciful guesses on the origins of the Rom.
At this point the observant reader will have decided that black must be a "burned" word, and so it is.
In Sanskrit, the fearsome Shiva's name is euphemistic — it's literally "the friendly one". The god's original name was Rudra, from a root which means to roar or scream; English relations include rout and riot. Digressing slightly, the Hindu Trimurti of principal gods is made up of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer, a neat division of labor.
In general the human race has never been inclined to call a spade a spade, particularly when the object under discussion has a temper and can kill you. "Speak of the devil and he will appear" is a proverb in many languages, and the only surprise is that European languages had to wait to borrow the word taboo from Polynesian instead of having developed their own. ("Euphemism" is close; it's Greek for "speak well of", so it's a member of the fate/fame group discussed below.) The proper name of the avenging Greek Furies (from a root that meant "wrathful") was almost never used; they were instead called the Eumenides, daughters of kindness. Jews do not speak the True Name (JHVH) of God.
Northern Indo-European languages do not use the "real" ie name of the bear, which is rkthos, from a root that means "destroyer". The animal was regarded with awe and fear, so bear and its Germanic relatives bruin, Bjorn, etc. mean "brown", as mentioned above. The Slavic and Welsh names of the animal mean "honey-eater", the Baltic names mean "shaggy", and the Irish name means "good calf"! The Arctic is, however, the Land of the Bear in Greek, the star Arcturus means "bear guardian", and the Latin for the animal is ursus. Hittite and Sanskrit also have ark- names. Presumably those who lived in warm climes could better afford to offend far-off bears compared to their northern brethren, although the Kelts did allow the root to be used as a compliment in personal names like Arthur (arto-wiros, bear-man — c.f. werewolf).
The wolf and weasel have propitiatory names in many languages. Note that the wolverine, despite its name, is actually the world's largest weasel, but even the small members of the tribe have always been feared for their speed and bloodthirsty dispositions. Trivia warning: The "wolf in sheep's clothing" was already a cliché when Jesus used it to describe false prophets, but there is a distinct possibility that wolf is related to wool! There is an Indo-European wel- root meaning to snatch, tear, or strike. Wool is so-called because it was pulled off the sheep before shearing came in fashion. Other "snatch" relatives are vulture and convulse, literally to strongly tear, while revulsion is "pulling back". From the "strike" sense, we get the Latin word for "wound" — vulnus — seen in vulnerable. In Germanic Valkyrie and Valhalla the first syllable means slain [in battle].
Wool is the ancestor of Welsh flannel and French velvet and velour, so a wolf is related to Velcro®, q.v. Latin dropped the initial /W/ of an archaic welana and produced lana as their word for wool. The only obvious English relative is lanolin, wool oil. (Lanate means "wooly" and lanuginous means "downy", but they are rather hard to work into a conversation.)
On the side, both snatch and snack are from a root that means to suddenly grab hold of, so a snack has always meant a meal on the run. The vulgar slang sense of "snatch" — the female genitals — seems to be changed back again from the edible snack.
Name magic has always been potent, and in many cultures a person had a "public" name and a "private" name known to very few, because hexes and spells could only by done by someone who knew your real name. There is a classic science fiction story called True Names, where the idea was extended to computer hackers who were safe as long as the authorities did not learn their carefully-guarded "true names" — i.e., the actual names and addresses behind their Internet pseudonyms. (Hex, a magic spell, is a 20th-century American word, from German hexe, witch, related to hag.)
When used in the computer sense, "to hack" does NOT mean "gain unauthorized access to a computer", it's a compliment meaning "work in a dogged or obsessed fashion", so it's probably from the image of hoeing or chopping wood. The masses have an unfortunate tendency to pick up a word with a specific, technical meaning, misunderstand it completely, and use it in a sense utterly foreign to the scientists, engineers, doctors, etc. who coined it. C.f., clone and quantum leap, which do NOT mean what most people think.
[02Apr08] Hooker has had very divergent meanings. It once meant a pickpocket or petty thief who "hooked" valuables. This led to the American slang for a streetwalker who "hooked" her clientele. During the U.S. Civil War, the many prostitutes around General Joseph Hooker's headquarters were sardonically known as "Hooker's Brigade", but this was a pun, since the prostitute sense is 20 years earlier than the general. In a huge jump, the Amish were once called hookers, because they used hooks instead of buttons on their clothing. (The Old Order Mennonites or Amish try to live in a purely biblical manner, and the Bible does not indicate that the Israelites used buttons, let alone electricity or automobiles.)
Clear back to the ancient Greeks, a prized import from India was the blue dye they called indikon, the Indian substance. This became indicum in Latin, indico in Spanish, and finally indigo in Portuguese, through whom Indian goods were imported into Europe for a couple of hundred years. (The Sanskrit name is anil, a good crossword puzzle word and the basis of modern synthetic aniline dyes.) The relationship between India and indigo is thus exactly opposite to Brazil, which in the Middle Ages was the name of a red dye made from the bark of a tropical African tree. The country was so-named because the Portuguese found lots of brazil trees there.
In the original partition of India in 1947, all the Islamic areas were lumped into Pakistan, including the province of East Bengal clear over on the other side of the subcontinent. Since the Bengalis had no geographic, political, ethnic, or linguistic connection to the Punjab, they promptly revolted and created Bangladesh, "country of Bengal", where presumably everyone lives in a bungalow, a "Bengal-style" dwelling.
While on the subject of mobs, the phrase to "read the riot act" was (and maybe still is, for all I know) completely literal. The British Riot Act, enacted in 1714, stated that the authorities had to read to the crowd, word for word, a specific statement proclaiming that the proceedings had been declared an unlawful assembly, and then they had one hour to disperse or be subject to felony arrest. Once the Riot Act had been read, the clock started ticking. Think of the fixed formula U.S. police use while "reading their rights" to suspects, the so-called "Miranda Warning" against self-incrimination. Presumably the Riot Act grew out of a successful claim that assembly for peaceful protest was legal, and how were the members of the crowd supposed to know that things had escalated to the point where they were breaking the law unless someone in a position of authority told them so? OK, OK, here is the required wording of the Riot Act declaration.