Quacks, Lunatics, and Dangerous Clowns (1)
People invent new words to describe new phenomena. Take “quack” as an example. In my schoolboy ignorance I used to think that “quack” was an amusing slang noun derived from the word describing the noise a duck makes. Not at all. It is an earlier seventeenth-century abbreviation of an entirely serious sixteenth-century Dutch word meaning “a pedlar of false cures,” that came into English as “quacksalver.”