Logomacy
Between logomachy and logomancy . . .

Jesse Sheidlower, in Slate, writes:

John Leland kicks off his entertaining new book, Hip: The History, with a seductive little linguistic anecdote. The word hip, he says, derives from the West African language Wolof, and was “cultivated by slaves” from West Africa. Leland goes on to use the etymology of the word as a framing device for part of his argument: Hip—the word and the concept—”was one of the tools Africans developed to negotiate an alien landscape, and one of the legacies they contributed to it.” Sounds fascinating, right?

There’s just one problem: The etymology is wrong.

Mighty weathervanes grow. Naked Translations, in discussing how to translate flip-flop into French has a really neat discussion of the evolution of the French term for weathervane: girouette. A crucial step appears like it might have been an eggcorn. Wirewite became gyrouette, probably because the folk-etymology of gire (turn) + rouette (little wheel) seemed more compelling than the real ancestral Anglo-Norman borrowing of Norse veðrviti (weather + indicator).

From the same post:

Finally, this morning on Radio 4, I heard two men bicker over whether English spelling should be simplified or not. The one against it argued that a word’s spelling gives us a good idea of its etymology and origin, the other argued that a word’s spelling is actually often misleading (see girouette!). However, I think that if you simplify English, then you’ll lose any chance at all of knowing where a word comes from and what its relationship to other words is.

For what it’s worth, I agree. As a word nerd the advantages of simplified spelling often seem to me to be overstated.