Word or Phrase Origins that Enhance or Amuse

[Jabberwocky]

Sarcastic comes from to strip the flesh from. Slogan comes two Celtic words meaning battlecry. Rumor originally meant a widespread noise. Companion comes from 'with bread'. Canary means a type of yellow. The color is named after a bird, and the bird is named after the Canary Islands, and the islands were originally named for the wild dogs ("canis") that the Romans found there.

I like this one from http://homepage.mac.com/ciaranbrewster/files/nice.html

The word "nice" has one of the most interesting etymologies in the English language, as its meaning has completely changed over the centuries.

The word "nice", like many words in the English language, came to us through Old French and ultimately from Latin. The Latin word nescius means "unaware," "not knowing," or "ignorant." We can see this more clearly when we dissect the word into its parts; ne- means "not" and scire means "know, understand." The latter is the root that we also find in the word science. So, at least etymologically speaking, the word nice means ignorant, which itself comes from the from two Latin roots i- “not” and gnarus “to know, be acquainted with.”

Thus, the original usage of the word nice in the English language had the approximate meaning of "ignorant, silly, foolish." The meaning of the word continually evolved – over time having the following senses: timid, fussy, wanton, dissolute, showy, ostentatious, dainty, elegant delicate, careful, refined, respectable, decent, agreeable, delightful, kind, and thoughtful.

There are trends in generating new words in the tech area that irk me a little. Recursive acronyms is one. The program wine stands for wine is not an emulator. What does the wine that w stands for mean. Wine is not an emulator on to infinity. To many computer people had their first orgasm reading Goedel, Escher, Bach. The other one is to compress phrases, for instance modem is from modulate demodulate and codec from code decode.

Here is a origin of interest to Bluelighters from http://www.etymonline.com

rave (v.)
c.1374, "to show signs of madness or delirium," from O.Fr. raver, variant of resver "to dream, wander, rave," of unknown origin (see reverie). The identical (in form) verb meaning "to wander, stray, rove" first appeared c.1300 in Scottish and northern dialect, and is probably from an unrelated Scand. word (cf. Icelandic rafa). Sense of "talk enthusiastically about" first recorded 1704. Noun meaning "rowdy party" is from 1960, though rave-up was British slang for "wild party" from 1940; specific modern sense of "mass party with loud, fast electronic music and often psychedelic drugs" is from 1989. Raver, from this sense, is first recorded 1991. Raving is attested from 1475; sense of "remarkable" is from 1841.

 

[Rhisper]

I think the etymology for the word thing is a somewhat interesting thing. From wikipedia:

The Old Norse, Old Frisian and Old English þing with the meaning "assembly" is identical in origin to the English word thing, German Ding, Dutch ding, and modern Scandinavian ting when meaning "object".[1] They are derived from Common Germanic *þengan meaning "appointed time", and some suggest an origin in Proto-Indo-European *ten-, "stretch", as in a "stretch of time for an assembly".[1] The evolution of the word thing from "assembly" to "object" is paralleled in the evolution of the Latin causa ("judicial lawsuit") to modern French chose, Spanish/Italian cosa and Portuguese coisa (all meaning "object" or "thing").

In English the term is attested from 685 to 686 in the older meaning "assembly", later it referred to a being, entity or matter (sometime before 899), and then also an act, deed, or event (from about 1000). The meaning of personal possessions, commonly in plural (possibly influenced by Old Icelandic things meaning objects, articles, or valuables), first appears recorded in Middle English in around 1300.