seen @ The Guardian/Mind your language blog: Words are stupid, words are fun
English is a marvellous mashup of words. A few Celtic placenames. A stock of Old English words (day and night, black and white, food and drink, life and death, beer). More than twice as many words adopted from Norman French (marriage, parliament). Sometimes competing words from both: motherhood (Old English) and maternity (Norman French). Words of Greek derivation, like octopus. Words of Latin derivation, such as campus and ultimatum. Words from all over the place: Welsh (corgi), Irish (brogues), Arabic (algebra), German (hamster), Chinese (typhoon), Japanese (tycoon), American Indian (tobacco), Hawaian (ukulele), and many more.
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Technology is a continual source of new words. The man who developed the wireless technology Bluetooth in 1996 was reading a historical novel about Harald Bluetooth, a 10th-century King of Denmark, at the time and appropriated his name. Spam, in the sense of unwanted emails, was named after the 1970 Monty Python cafe sketch in which Spam, in the sense of unwanted canned meat, was compulsory in every dish. ...
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