SOME INTERESTING WORD ORIGINS

Barbecue

This American contribution to international cuisine actually originated in the Caribbean, and the word comes to us via Spanish from its Indian roots. The original sense of barbecue is that of a raised, wooden (later metal) framework used for either sleeping upon or curing meats. The Indians of Guiana called it a babracot and the Haitians a barbacoa. The Spanish evidently acquired the Haitian word and it came into English from the Spanish. The earliest English cite, used for a sleeping platform, is from 1697. By 1733 the word was being used for an open-air, social gathering featuring the grilling of meat.

Beefeater

This term for the Warders of the Tower of London was in use by 1670. The term is quite literal, being a reference well-fed servants of the royal household. It is often postulated the term comes from the French buffetier. This is incorrect.

Buck

Buck, the slang term for a dollar, is a clipped form of buckskin. On the American frontier, buckskins were often used as units of commerce. The term buck, meaning a unit of value, dates to at least 1748.

Bulls and Bears

These two stock market terms appear in the early 18th century. Bear was the first to appear, first recorded in 1709, and originally referred to the practice of selling stock one does not yet own for delivery at a future date with the expectation that the price would fall in the meantime, enabling the speculator to buy the stock at a lower price. Such speculators were called bear-skin jobbers after the phrase sell the bear's skin before one has caught the bear. Gradually, the term took on the meaning of being generally pessimistic about stock prices. Bull appears a few years later, in 1714, and was almost certainly influenced by bear.

Knight

This word for a horsed warrior has an interesting history. It is Germanic in origin, but its cognates in Dutch and German, Knecht, mean farm hand, boy, slave, and servitude--a far cry from the English sense of nobility.
The earliest meaning of knight, or more accurately cniht, in English is servant or boy. This use dates to around the year 950. This sense fell out of use in the 13th century, probably to avoid confusion with the second sense. The sense meaning nobility (corresponding to Dutch and German Ridder and Ritter, respectively), dates to about 1100 and derives from the idea that the knight was a servant of the king. Thus in English, the servant became ennobled, while he remained low in the other Germanic languages. Cavalier which is the literal equivalent of the Dutch or German words, dates to the 15th century and was adopted from the Spanish--hence the Latin root. While the denotation is the same as knight, the connotation is different. Cavalier was never an official title and its association with the supporters of Charles I in the English Civil War gave rise to the idea that cavaliers were noble, but distracted and careless.

Lord

This word for master derives from the Old English hláford or literally bread (loaf)-ward. Originally, it is a reference to the head of a household; servants in the house would be entitled to be fed by the master. The general sense of master, as opposed to the specific sense of a provider of bread, is well established by c. 950.

Muckety-Muck

The origin of this word for an important person is from the Chinook Jargon muck-a-muck, meaning plenty of food. A visitor or guest who was important would rate a banquet. It made is published appearance in English in 1856. It's unrelated to the English word muck. Chinook Jargon, not to be confused with the native American language Chinook, was a pidgen used by traders in the American Northwest with Chinook, Nootka, English, and French at its core.

Pig

This derogatory term for a police officer is thought by many to be a usage coined in the 1960s. Various explanations for the term have been posited. Among them is the idea the term derives from the gas masks worn by riot police in the 1960s that made the officers look like pigs. Another is that the term is derived from George Orwell's Animal Farm, where the pigs ran the farm and took away the other animals' liberties.
Both these, as well as any other twentieth century explanations are incorrect. The term predates the 1960s by at least 150 years. (Also, the dogs were the police officers in Animal Farm not the pigs.)
The OED2 has pig being used as a term for a contemptuous person as early as 1546. The earliest cite for a police officer in particular is from the Lexicon Balatronicum of 1811, which defines pig as "a China Street Pig, a Bow Street officer." The Bow Street Runners were an early police force of London, named after the street that housed their headquarters. The Lexicon Balatronicum also offers "floor the pig and bolt," meaning to knock the policeman down and run. According to Partridge, by 1873 the term's usage was restricted to plain-clothes officers. The term was an underground term, part of the criminal argot, until it emerged into the mainstream in the 1960s.

Red Herring

This term for deliberate misdirection comes from hunting. Poachers would interpose themselves between the prey and the hunting party and drag a red herring across the trail to mislead the dogs. This would give them the opportunity to bag the prey themselves.
A red herring was chosen because dog trainers often used the pungent fish to create a trail when training their hounds. The dogs, upon encountering the herring scent, would follow that trail as it was the one they had been trained with.

Scapegoat

This term, for one who is punished for the misdeeds of others, is the result of a mistranslation. The term was coined in 1530 by William Tyndale, who misread the Hebrew word 'azazel, the proper name of Canaanite demon, as 'ez ozel, literally "the goat that departs." In Leviticus 16:8, the scriptures describe how two goats should be prepared for an offering, lots should be drawn, and one should be sacrificed to the Lord as a sin-offering, and the other given to Azazel and set free in the wilderness bearing the sins of the people.
To be fair to Tyndale, he was not the only one to make this error. The Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Old Testament, uses tragos apopompaios, or the goat that is sent out. The Vulgate Bible refers to the second goat as a caper emissarius, or the emissary goat. Coverdale's 1535 Bible refers to it as a free goat. But it was Tyndale who coined the term scapegoat, or scapegoote as he spelled it. The King James Version retains Tyndale's scapegoat, but most modern translations have corrected the error and refer to Azazel.
It was not until 1824 that the word acquired its current, wider sense. All prior usages have been in terms of the Leviticus passage. The verb form appeared in 1943.

Shark

Shark, is an interesting word, first appearing much later than one might expect. It was coined by sailors on John Hawkins's 1568-69 expedition. This expedition returned a specimen of the fish to London. Where they caught the fish is not recorded, but the trip was one to the Caribbean and was famous for a battle with the Spanish fleet off Veracruz in Mexico. Why they called this fish a shark is not known.
But it is possible that the word derives from the Mayan word for the fish, xoc, pronounced showk. This word is represented in Mayan writing by a glyph of two fish fins or sometimes two fish. Given the destination of the Hawkins's expedition, it is possible that the sailors adopted the local Indian word for the fish.

Spam

This word for off-topic commercial posts to usenet message boards or unsolicited commercial e-mail is of uncertain origin, although there is a commonly accepted explanation that is probably correct.
The original Spam was coined in 1937 by the Hormel corporation as a name for its potted meat product. This brand name is a blend of spiced ham.
From there, the transition from meat product to internet term has a stop with Monty Python's Flying Circus. In 1970, that BBC comedy show aired a sketch that featured a cafe that had a menu that featured items like "egg, bacon, and spam;" "egg, bacon, sausage, and spam;" " spam, bacon, sausage, and spam;" "spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon, and spam;" and finally "lobster thermidor aux crevettes with a mornay sauce garnished with truffle pate, brandy, and a fried egg on top and spam." To make matters sillier, the cafe was filled with Vikings who periodically break out into song praising Spam: "Spam, spam, spam, spam ... lovely spam, wonderful spam ..."
Computer people adopted the term from the Python sketch to mean overrunning a fixed-sized buffer with too much data, in other words the data was like the Spam in the sketch, something excessive and undesirable. With the commercialization of the internet, the term expanded to include the unwanted commercial messages and that became the primary meaning.
There are two common alternate explanations that are certainly false. The first is that it refers to a quality of the meat product such that when you throw it at a wall, most of it bounces off, but a little sticks--much like commercial spam, most of which is deleted but some is answered. While this is no more silly than the Monty Python explanation, it does not jibe with the original computer sense of overloading a buffer. The second false explanation is that the computer spam is an acronym of some sort, but seldom is any acronym proferred to explain it.

Throw the Baby Out With the Bathwater

There is a bit of false internet lore circling the globe about life in England in the 1500s. One of the claims this gem of wisdom makes is that the phrase throw the baby out with the bathwater comes from the practice of taking annual baths using the same bathwater as the other family members. By the time the children got a chance to bathe, the water would be so dirty that infants could be lost in it. Hence the phrase.
The phrase in question does happen date to the 1500s, but the rest of the above story is pure fancy.
This is actually a German proverb that dates to 1512. It was first recorded by Thomas Murner's in his satire Narrenbeschwörung. Despite its fame in German (used by such notables as Luther, Kepler, Goethe, Bismarck, Mann, and Grass), it doesn't appear in English for several more centuries, until Thomas Carlyle translated it and used it in an 1849 essay on slavery.
There is no evidence that anyone ever actually tossed out a baby with the bathwater; it is simply evocative and alliterative imagery.

Turkey

The bird we today call a turkey is native to America. Yet, how did it become associated with the country of Turkey?
The answer is that the American wildfowl is not the only bird called a turkey. That, since 1552, is also a name for the guinea-fowl. That bird, native to Africa, was brought to Europe via Turkey. When Europeans arrived in America, they noticed similarities between the guinea-fowl and the American bird and called the latter turkey. So, the name is from the country although the bird is in no way associated with it.
Theatrical use of turkey to mean a flop dates to 1927. General disparaging use dates to 1951. Exactly why the word was chosen is uncertain, but it is probably because of the bird's fabled low intelligence.

In: http://www.wordorigins.org/home.htm compiled and edited by Leopoldo Costa to be posted.