Personally, I find etymology very interesting. I am, after all, a quondam medievalist whose interests lay particularly in historical linguistics. As I intimated in my previous post, though, I also find the way it is generally served up for public consumption to be a bit irritating.

I have mixed feelings about Hotforwords. On the plus side, she's talking about language, she generally does some research, and she seems to have a clue about linguistic matters. (Oh, yeah, and she really is hot.) On the other hand, she confines herself to a fairly trivial form of etymology: stories about word origins shorn of historical linguistics. It also appears that her research is confined to looking things up in a few of the standard references (like the OED), and, more questionably, Wikipedia.

[Update #1: Olympia seems to have taken down postmoderncourtesan, so the link is dead.]

Last time, in reference to a post on Postmodern Courtesan, I wrote about the sound of cunt and the impression that it sounds "harsh". Today, as promised, I want to talk about its etymology.

Writing about ghost words got me thinking about collective terms for animals, especially the weird ones that someone always trots out as a bit of trivia. (I once won a barroom trivia contest for being able to state that a group of rhinoceroses was called a "crash.")

A ghost word is a word that was created by the error of lexicographers, one that has no independent existence. A classic example is Dord, which appeared in the second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary. The entry was meant to be an abbreviation (D or d) for density. Snopes.com does their usual fine job of explaining the confusion.