Halls of ivy

[Laurence Horn]

>Fred Shapiro wrote:
>>
>> I don't have an answer yet, but I find this question amusing since it is
>> so emblematic of popular attitudes toward etymology.  Sort of the opposite
>> of Occam's Razor, as an extremely far-fetched explanation is advanced
>> while the obvious and undoubtedly truthful explanation is prefaced with
>> "Surely it is not simply from..."
>
>Yes.  How do people come up with these things?  And why do others give them
>credence?  I think the phenomenon is related to general popular paranoia:
>The obvious explanation for something must be a cover-up for a much more
>complicated (and usually sinister) truth, and the more self-evident the
>explanation the more devious and dangerous the plotters are.
>
A more positive spin is that humans love explanations, especially elegant
ones-- even incorrect or unsubstantiated elegant ones.  I'm not sure it's
necessarily paranoia; I see it as stemming from the same impulse that leads
to mythological and, dare I say, religious "explanation" of the otherwise
inexplicable.  It's an instance of the general human impulse to try to
rationalize the (apparently) irrational, or to access the inaccessible
(inaccessible, at least, if one doesn't have the relevant training in the
relevant science).  What we're dealing with here (e.g. with IV League/Halls
of IV) is invented etymology but not true folk etymology, since our
inventors aren't really the "folk" who are responsible for the standard
examples of motivated reanalysis--'sparrow grass' (for 'asparagus') or more
recently 'shoe-in' (very popular during the recent NCAA selection
projection shows) or 'bonified'.   Our cases are more like the $250
Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe, the alligators in the NYC sewers, and other
urban legends, and as with those cases the internet seems a particularly
fertile breeding ground.  One nice domain for these pseudo-etymologies is
that of the pseudo-acronym:

        POSH (supposedly from "port out, starboard home")
        COP (from "constable on patrol")
        HOBO (from "hopped on below Ossining"), according to a 1958 letter
to       the Chicago Tribune Barry unearthed)
        SNOB (from s[ine] nob[ilitate])
and, last but not least, or at least not least often,
        FUCK (from either "fornication under consent of the king" or "for
unlawful carnal knowledge", or some combination or variant of these)

You can all probably add your own.  Needless to say, the only evidence ever
presented for any of these "derivations" is that other "authorities"
asserted these as the gospel truth, but in any case, they tend to be
presented as secret lore previously available only to the initiates (cf.
mythology again).  Another source of examples is the invention of
"corrected" etymologies that often catch on--"Welsh rarebit" (you can buy
Stouffer's version at a supermarket near you) replacing the earlier "Welsh
rabbit", invented by those who didn't realize that the original was
intended as a kind of ethnic slur rather than a straight description.

larry