"Sunday" Trivia 14

Late again! Final projects have been occupying my brain. Here's some trivia for you.

(Spoiler alert.) The answer to last week's trivia question was pineapple, a fruit which is called ananas in a huge variety of languages other than English. The etymology of pineapple is interesting as well - the term originally referred to pine cones, and was used for the fruit because of their similarity in shape. Pine cone emerged as a replacement a few centuries later.

English has a lot of weird little compound nouns like this, especially as names for plants and animals. Some are very transparent, like jellyfish, groundhog, or firefly. Others used to be transparent but are a little hazy now, like kiwifruit, which was named after the flightless bird but is just known as kiwi to some cultures with less interesting wildlife. Or horseradish - in Old English, horse was often used to mean "strong" or "large." Still others seem transparent on first glance, like greyhound, which actually derives from Old English grig-, "bitch," not the color.

But some are extremely opaque. Butterfly, for example, may come from myths about witches disguised as insects who steal butter, or the color of the bug, or the color of its excrement. (Butterflies have funky names in many languages, including psyche, "soul," in Ancient Greek and mariposa, "Mary rests," in Spanish.) Or cockroach, which uses the folk etymology of cock, "rooster," and roach, a type of fish, but is actually derived from Spanish cucaracha.

Your trivia question today involves compound nouns. No hyphens or spaces are allowed for any answer. Name:

1. An animal whose name is a compound noun with a religious etymology.
2. An animal whose name is from a Dutch compound noun.
3. An animal whose name derives originally from the names of two animals in Greek, because in ancient times it was thought to be a hybrid of the two.

(Update: Turns out there are a few answers to number 2! Can you name an example from Netherlands Dutch and from Afrikaans Dutch?)

Sunday Trivia 8

I'm back from spring break and back to fully fledged trivia.

Last week's Sunday trivia had an answer involving an eggcorn, a respelling based on a misinterpretation or mishearing of a word or phrase. Often these can be pretty funny, like power mower instead of paramour or old-timer's disease for Alzheimer's disease. Eggcorn is itself an eggcorn from a misinterpretation of acorn.

Misinterpretations longer than a single word or phrase, like those from lines of songs, are called mondegreens. This term is another self-reference, based on Sylvia Wright's childhood understanding of a 17th-century ballad:

They hae slain the Earl O' Moray,
And Lady Mondegreen.

Which actually reads:

They hae slain the Earl O' Moray,
And laid him on the green.

Some mondegreens from popular songs are common but nonetheless hilarious: "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy" from Hendrix's Purple Haze and "There's a bathroom on the right" from Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival. (The lyrics are actually "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky" and "There's a bad moon on the rise.") Reverse mondegreens are nonsense which has been derived from normal language, like the Iron Butterfly song In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, which comes from "In the Garden of Eden." Intentional reinterpretation of foreign song lyrics has its own special charm, and is known as soramimi. (You could call Mots d'Heures soramimi.)

Less transparent and not quite as funny are misinterpretations that have shifted into normal usage through folk etymology, in which a word is reshaped to something the speaker is more familiar with. So, the Latinate asparagus becomes sparrowgrass to some speakers because they are familiar with sparrows and grass, or the Spanish cucaracha becomes cockroach because the speaker already knows cocks and roaches (back then a type of fish.) In some sense these are just eggcorns that have gained credence.

Today's answer comes from an old and opaque folk etymology. Name an herb whose spelling was altered to match a familiar flower and a familiar name.