How to make anything sound scary for fun and profit
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/magic-words-that-will-eat-your-soul
Pattern-seeking drives jokes, poetry, and pseudo-etymology alike; but when mere look- or sound-alikes are taken as a word’s real history without evidence, the joke stops.
Etymologists must have the unique luxury of being attractors of those who indulge this flavor of rhetoric.