False etymologies, continued
I was reading Heather McHugh's "Broken, as English" (on Tom Phillips's A Humument and the fragments of Archilocus), in which she breaks down "together" as "to-get-her"...I thought of two other false etymologies:
"Bowdlerize" comes from the British practice of censoring translations of the seedy Baudelaire (mispronounced "bowdler").
And...I forgot the other one.
Heather = heat-her? That wasn't it.
A long time ago I wondered if Adam Ant's name was meant to play off the word adamant.
That wasn't it, either.
Labels: false etymologies, Heather McHugh