Association With Urban Legends
Some etymologies are part of urban legends, and seem to respond to a general taste for the surprising, counterintuitive and even scandalous. One common example has to do with the phrase rule of thumb, meaning a rough measurement. An urban legend has it that the phrase refers to an old English law under which a man could legally beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb (though no such law ever existed).
In the United States, many of these scandalous legends have had to do with racism and slavery. Common words such as picnic, buck, and crowbar have been alleged to stem from derogatory terms or racist practices. The "discovery" of these alleged etymologies is often believed by those who circulate them to draw attention to racist attitudes embedded in ordinary discourse. On one occasion, the use of the word niggardly led to the resignation of a U.S. public official because it sounded similar to the word nigger, despite the two words being unrelated etymologically.
Read more about this topic: False Etymology
Famous quotes containing the words association with, association, urban and/or legends:
“Association with women is the basis of good manners.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“They that have grown old in a single state are generally found to be morose, fretful and captious; tenacious of their own practices and maxims; soon offended by contradiction or negligence; and impatient of any association but with those that will watch their nod, and submit themselves to unlimited authority.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“The gay world that flourished in the half-century between 1890 and the beginning of the Second World War, a highly visible, remarkably complex, and continually changing gay male world, took shape in New York City.... It is not supposed to have existed.”
—George Chauncey, U.S. educator, author. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, p. 1, Basic Books (1994)
“Farm boys wild to couple
With anything with soft-wooded trees
With mounds of earthmounds
Of pine straw will keep themselves off
Animals by legends of their own:”
—James Dickey (b. 1923)