St. Isidore of Seville is commonly pictured with bees or pens, which are much alike
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/the-dark-ages
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What I just learnt from your story about St. Isidore reminds me closely of today’s internet :
- one has no clue about something
- a metaphorical light bulb pops up over his head
- he puts his intuition on a web page and waits for the doofs to swallow it.
And should someone who knows better dare argue, it will be the usual “Sure, you’re entitled to your own opinion as I’m to mine, but mine has more followers so shut up”.
Blessed be the Enlightenment ideals… 
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I still don’t know what to do with folk etymology. So powerful. So scorned.
If the wrong answer about a word was, for 1,000 years, the only authoritative answer available to anyone writing the word – isn’t that wrong answer inculded in the true history?
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… isn’t that wrong answer inculded in the true history?
It probably is (almost certainly actually), but not as a correct answer.
The history of science is riddled with educated blunders, erudite dead-ends and wild assumptions that after a while or three were brutally disproved but never forgotten - the phlogiston, the Ptolemaic system, countless drugs and treatments that disposed of way more patients than they healed, you name it.
And poor students must still learn them all…
The term folk etymology might be glossing important language forming forces too much. Something I think about.
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