Out of Little Eggcorns
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.