Womansplaining

We hear a lot in the media about mansplaining but in our household, I confess I’m just as likely to be guilty as David, especially when it comes to wordiness. Recently David used the word ‘entomology’ when he clearly meant ‘etymology.’ I couldn’t resist the temptation to correct him, though I understood his meaning perfectly well.

‘En-to-mo-lo-gy is the classification of species,’ I womansplained in my best teacher-voice, ‘whereas e-ty-mo-lo-gy’ is the study of the origin of words. That’s the one you want.’ The learned among you will have spotted my blunder, but I blundered on, musing aloud about how the similarity between the 2 words might make a good topic for a WordNerd blog. I grabbed my phone, searched for etymonline.com and typed in ‘entomology’ – only to discover that it means ‘the study of insects.’ My bad!

‘I’ll be able to remember that one now,’ said David. ‘Just think of ants. Antomology.’

‘Good tip,’ I said absently, racking my brain for the animal classification word – ‘Taxonomy!’ I exclaimed.

‘That must be connected to taxidermy - stuffing dead animals,’ David said. Now we another pair of similar words to untangle. Confused? Allow me to womansplain (with a lot of help from Etymonline.)

Etymology - from Greek etymologia "analysis of a word to find its true origin," or "study of the true sense (of a word)," with -logia "study of,” + etymon "true sense, original meaning." It found its way into English via Latin and Old French, appearing as ‘ethimolegia’ in the 1300’s.

Entomology - "the branch of zoology which treats of insects." From Greek entomon – insect, deriving from entomos "cut up.’ Aristotle coined this term in reference to insects’ notched, segmented bodies. Pliny, Latinized the term, coining insectum from in + secare "to cut." The word insectology was also used in English for a while, but it didn’t catch on.

Taxonomy - "science of classification." This entered English in  1819, from French taxonomie (1813), coined irregularly from Greek taxis "arrangement" + nomia "method."

Taxidermy - "art of preparing and preserving skins of animals and of stuffing and mounting the skins in forms resembling the living animal," 1820, from Greek taxis "arrangement” + derma "skin."