I found this link on language log which discusses an interesting attempt by the governor of California to incorporate the (imagined) etymological origins of two words into a discussion of an important social and political issue.
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4341
Wow. I’m with him all the way on the importance of the environment, but his attempt at leveraging etymology into this discussion is painfully wrong-headed.
I’m posting a link to it here because it is a particularly amusing example of the type of nonsense that even a quite intelligent person can spout when he or she attempts to dabble in etymology.
