Etymythologies

I will start.

I found this site: http://www.etymonline.com/ the other day when I was searching for the roots of the word 'flabbergast'. I didn't get very far (origins unknown), but the site more than makes up for it. You should send the man responsible apes, ivory and peacocks. He even begins with a very apt Borges quote:

"It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial epositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature."
-Jorge Luis Borges, Prologue to "El otro, el mismo."

"epositories"? Repositories. I have sacked my typist.

I didn't realise Momus was " a humorously disagreeable person, from Gk. Momos, god of ridicule (Gk. momos); also used in Eng. as personification of fault-finding and captious criticism."! That's tremendous, I'd totally missed it.

(Gregory, on a totally tangential tip, Lucian's dialogues in which Momos takes on all of Olympos, describing to the pantheon their ridiculousness, are priceless.)

I just found out that no-one knows where "she" comes from! People reckon it's scandinavian, but can't actually prove it. That is so gnarly.

she - probably evolved from O.E. seo, sio (acc. sie), fem. of demonstrative pronoun se "the." The O.E. word for "she" was heo, hio, however by 13c. the pronunciation of this had converged by phonetic evolution with he "he," so the fem. demonstrative pronoun was probably used it its place (cf. similar development in Du. zij, Ger. sie, Gk. he, etc.). The original h- survives in her. A relic of the O.E. pronoun is in Manchester-area dial. oo "she." She-devil "difficult woman" first recorded 1840.