Plenty of words have no clear origin
A new book investigating strange etymologies reads like a detective story
MANY WORDS are puzzles themselves. “Conundrum” confounds scholars; “bamboozle” beguiles them. Anatoly Liberman, an etymologist at the University of Minnesota, explains why in “Origin Uncertain”, a delightful romp through the annals of words’ origins.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Can we have a word?”
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