[Sethomas]

A while ago, after I sold a book of weird etymologies, I came up with "Seth's Law of Philology". It goes something like,

The square of the level of how much a conjectured word history is likely to be judged interesting is directly proportional to its likelihood of being apocryphal.

Like when I read that "snob" was an abbreviation for "sine nobitate", and there was a huge debate between Oxonians and Cambridge geeks over who started it, and then I finally found out that it was just a convoluted use of a dialectal term for a cobbler.