Harmless drudges like myself are always on the lookout for folk etymology, a process which alters a word so as to make it look or sound like a more familiar word. It should not be thought that this process is always the work of yokels; perplexed lexicographers of note have long being making asses of themselves in this business.
Let's take a few examples of this process. Asparagus is from sparagus, a medieval Latin form of a Greek word, found in Old Italian as sparacci and sparagi. By Shakespeare's time it had become sparrow-grass and has survived as such in many parts of England. Walker's Pronouncing Dictionary of 1791 explained that sparrow-grass was even then general because "asparagus has an air of stiffness and pedantry about it".
Cockroach came into being because of Captain John Smith's representation of the Spanish cacarucha as cacrootch in his description of Virginia, published in 1624. Cacrootch must be cockroach, it was thought: it sounds and looks like it, after all. The fact that it resembles neither a cock nor a roach didn't matter.
The Dutch made kakerlak of it: worse still.
Another example of the process of transforming a word to show an assumed relation to a better understood word is female, a word known in the 14th century, and also found earlier as femel and femelle. These were all derived through Middle French from Latin femella, diminutive of femina, a woman.
In England, the similarity in appearance and pronunciation between female and male led to the notion that the former is derived from the latter, and also to the retention of the spelling female rather than femel or femelle.
I once found the word banyan in a glossary sent by W.H. Patterson in 1880 to Joseph Wright, editor of the monumental English Dialect Dictionary at Oxford. Patterson defined banyan as "a flannel jacket still worn by Carlingford oystermen and fishermen".
I sent the word to the late Tomas de Bhaldraithe, thinking it was bainin. He thought so too until he found that banyan was a smoking jacket of light blue flannel, worn in the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich by cadets. Far from the cottages of the west it had its origin.
A banyan was a loose gown of flannel worn in India; and it came from the Portuguese banian, a Hindu trader, especially one from the province of Guzerat. We both, de Bhaldraithe wrote to me ruefully, had come close to composing a folk-etymology of our own.