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I assume (generous interpretation and not much of a stretch) that that's exactly what his father meant, and if so, his father was right. It's funny that it would even "seem wrong", but it's not wrong. Recently published dictionaries do a much better job than they used to, so you will often see "origin unknown, poss. related to X or Y", where an older dictionary simply proclaimed the etymology. So, was the truth recently lost? Or did the lexicographers recently find evidence that their confidently proclaimed etymology might just be poppycock? So if there are lots of cases where etymology is disputed, and there are, then not all claims can be right. Many must have been wrong, and it stands to reason that not all errors have been discovered. Hundreds of thousands of words, place names, personal and surnames, passed from mouth to mouth by mostly illiterate humans for whom X sounds like "eggs" in a game of telephone ("Chinese whispers") lasting centuries, repeatedly crossing dialect and language boundaries, multiplied by the number of human languages, and does it really seem wrong that "a lot of proposed etymological theories are inaccurate"? If the claim were really that there are no correct etymologies, that would certainly be wrong, but if "poppycock" meant the confidence of the old dictionaries was not justified, I would say that time has vindicated his claim. |