Devious Derivations

In this new book, word maven Hugh Rawson brings you a marvelously entertaining roundup of 1,000 spurious etymologies, then enlightens you with their genuine counterparts. Some wiseacre (which, by the way, has nothing to do with land measure) may have told you that a tip is something you give a waiter "to insure promptness," or that James I once knighted a remarkable side of beef, saying, "Arise, Sir Loin," but like hundreds of oft-repeated accounts of word origins, they're just too good to be true. People, it seems, are etymologizing creatures, and if a certain lexical lineage is unclear, they are sure to invent one. If you hear that pumpernickel was named by Napoleon Bonaparte, who, upon being served the dark German bread, derided it as "pain pour Nicol" (bread for his horse, Nicol), you can take it with a grain of salt (which since 1647 has been making questionable tales, like questionable meat, more palatable). With his third book, Hugh Rawson pulls off the literary equivalent of a hat trick (which is original not to ice hockey, it turns out, but to cricket).