While browsing through a local used bookstore with my one-time Lovely Assistant, I discovered The Superior Person’s little Book of Words. It’s a lovely little work, which gives definitions and suggested usages for something like 500 neglected or misunderstood words. The principle behind the book is that people often let so-called experts win arguments not because their ideas are better, but because their statements are more incomprehensible. Hence, this is a book of weaponry.
My favourite entry so far is for Antimony:
A poisonous metal. So-called, according to tradition, because of its use in a mass poisoning of monks in the fifteenth century by an alchemist named, rather delightfully, Basil Valentine. Hence, anti-moine, or
hostile to monks. Its appropriate usage in the present century (ie, the substance, not the word) would lie in its administration to people who smoke pipes in elevators.
The etymology is apparently not true — antimony seems to go back to the Latin antimonium — but I really wish it were. I would admire a language that named something after its deleterious effects on monks.