Happy to see etymology discussion. I used to run r/etymology, suspended it during the API debacle as part of the blackout, and got replaced by Reddit and banned by the new mod.

The “were” in “werewolf” also gives us “world” (originally referring to humanity, as in “the epoch of mankind”) and also came through Latin, giving us, among other things, “virtue” (as in, the measure of a man, I think), and “virile”.

“Sculptors in antique Rome could fix mistakes they made by mixing marble dust with wax. If a sculptor was especially gifted and made no mistakes that needed fixing, they would market their art as “sin cera”, which means “without wax”, which is where the word “sincere” comes from.” (Source: Pooptimist@lemmy.world)

Extremely unlikely. Always be careful of etymologies that are just a little too pat. Sometimes they hold up, but more often they’re just someone “seeing Jesus in the toast” and then making up some bullshit to justify it.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/sincere

Apron is a fun one. The Latin word for cloth, banner, tablecloth is mappa. It’s the same word used in “mappa mundi” meaning map of the world (we contract that to just map now). French often changed Latin m to n, so mappa became nappe, then nape.

English borrowed nape directly for cloth and added it’s native diminutive suffix -kin to refer to a small cloth, a napkin.

But there was also a similar diminutive in French - naperon. A cloth to keep your front clean. English borrowed that too, as napron. Then, sometime around the 15th century, “a napron” got mistaken for “an apron” since they sound identical. And that’s what we have today. (Source etymonline and others)

I’ll borrow this from my contribution to a discussion yesterday, but Shakespeare coined fewer phrases than you’d think, and probably not very many words at all (though certainly more than the average schlub):

Dictionaries source by earliest known written use, and Willy Shakes was a unicorn for that purpose.

He was an upjumped middle-class prodigy from barely a century after the introduction of the printing press, with a mediocre education by the standards of the day, writing prolifically for both popular and elevated audiences. He was also famous enough in his own day to have had his collected works published, and the fact that his reputation exploded after his death ensured those volumes survived. He would have been writing slightly differently from many of his contemporaries, and a much higher amount of what he wrote has survived.

As a further aside, he’s one of the best-researched non-noble lives of his era, and the “Authorship question” is the equivalent of History Channel Ancient Aliens “documentaries.” It’s titillating nonsense put out by snobs who can’t fathom that their literary idol was not an elite (while still definitely privileged compared to the truly common person).

This is a pretty common one, but, the color orange was named after the fruit. Not the other way around.