The Etymologicon

So it was Carl and not Sigmund who decided that a psychological problem should be called a complex. Then he thought up introverts and extroverts, and finally, realising that naming was a doddle, he invented synchronicity and ambivalent. And with that he sat down to rest

Analysis is Greek for release. So Freud’s new art would be, literally, the liberation of the butterfly. How pretty! Fr

This was the belief of the Maoris, and of the Aztecs in whose mythology Itzpapalotl was the goddess of the Obsidian Butterfly: a soul encased in stone who could be freed only by another tongue-twisting god called Tezcatlipoca.

There also seems to have been a ghost of this belief among the ancient Greeks. The Greek for butterfly was psyche, and Psyche was the goddess of the soul.

Malays also repeat verbs to intensify them, so I really like would be rendered as I like like, or suka suka.

Malay you form your plural by repeating the noun, so tables would become table table. It’s a system with some sort of logic to it.

Now, you may ask yourself, what sort of person goes around peering at butterfly poo and then naming an insect after it? The answer, it would appear, is that Dutch people do that. Or at least, an old Dutch word for butterfly was boterschijte.

Angora came from Ankara, the capital of Turkey.

Quintilian says that after you have chosen your words you must weave them together into a fabric – in textu iungantur – until you have a fine and delicate text[ure[il

Even when wood was finally overtaken by the newfangled invention of parchment, the Germans kept the name, and so did the English. Bok became boc became book.

Incidentally, bank comes from an old Italian word for bench, because money-lenders used to sit behind a bench in the marketplace from which they would do their deals. If a money-lender failed to make good on one of his arrangements, his bench would be ceremonially broken, and the old Italian for a broken bench was banca-rotta or bankrupt.