Bringing you etymologies as real as the Altaic language family

However, Goofy was originally developed for the French market under the name Gouphil, a blend of goupil (an archaic word for 'fox') and the name Philippe. When his standalone French series got cancelled before it was even aired, he ended up getting added into the American side of the Mickey Mouse universe. Rather than come up with an entirely new, localized name, the people at Disney decided to just make slight tweaks to his existing French name, dropping the final L and respelling it to be more intuitive in English.

The word "vituperation" looks Latin at its surface, and this is partly true, but there is more to the story than that. You see, in modern times, Finland is predominantly Lutheran, but when it was originally Christianized, Martin Luther had not even been born yet, and most of the population adhered to Roman Catholicism. As a relatively newer addition to the Catholic realm, churches in Finland would sometimes import clergy from other countries, not to mention the missionaries that continued to come in and convert even more Finns. At one point, a missionary from France spent a few years in Turku, and noticed many of the locals expressing their anger by saying "vittu perkele". As church records were typically in Latin, this missionary got creative and converted the Finnish profanities he heard so often into the Latin verb "vittupercelare". This new verb gained popularity due to its seeming extravagance, although eventually it got shortened to just "vittuperare", and, being from France (the French language having lost most if not all its geminate consonants by this point), the double [t] simplified to just one, thus: "vituperare". It was then from a derivation of this newly-coined Latin verb that "vituperation" and "vituperate" ultimately made their way into English.

Finnish colonists in Indonesia are often ignored in history, but the reality is that there are several toponyms there that can be attributed to them. The most notable of these is the island of Sulawesi. This name was borrowed from the Finnish “suolavesi” meaning “saltwater”. Why that name, you might ask? The Finns who colonized Sulawesi had certainly seen saltwater before, so this island was not unique in that regard, but they needed a name characteristic of the island — if you’ve seen a map of Sulawesi you’d know it branches out in somewhere between four and five directions like some sort of brittle star — and considering it consisted almost entirely of peninsulas with large stretches of water separating them, “saltwater” made sense. Thus, Suolavesi was born, then borrowed into the local languages, and eventually became the predominantly-used name for the island.

Contrary to popular belief, "voila", a loanword from French (voilà if proper diacritics are used), is not ultimately from "vois là" (= "see there") with its spelling contracted, but actually from maritime speech. Whenever a sailor would climb up the mast to look around, and notice the sail of another ship, they would cry "Voile! Ah!" ("voile" of course meaning "sail" in French), to inform the rest of the crew that another ship has been spotted. Once the word made its way into mainstream French, it was quickly picked up by English speakers as well in an attempt to seem fashionable, and the rest is history.

The verb "spawn" in the context of entities generating in video games is only spelt that way due to homophony with the existing word "spawn" meaning "reproduce", which also happens to be fairly semantically close. In reality, it comes from "spon", short for "spontaneously generate".

Now, to get to the etymology itself: as mentioned before, although the group migrating to Greater London collectively called themselves the Bight Saxons, speakers of North Germanic formed a majority of the population, therefore it should be no surprise that many of the newly-named locations in what would become Greater London were North Germanic in origin. Among these was a settlement directly on the banks of the Thames, built in an otherwise non-wooded area having a small patch of trees — a grove. This new settlement was thus dubbed Lunden, that name later got corrupted to London, and the rest is history.

The two vessels were within a close enough distance to each other to be able to communicate by shouting. Much to everyone’s chagrin, however, neither side had any crew members with a background in the language spoken by the other, a fact known with certainty by both sides due to having seen each other’s flags. Neither boat made an attempt to communicate with the other, but the English fishermen assumed nonetheless that the Germans would try to establish contact, for reasons still unknown. What followed was that a sailor on the Hanoverian vessel noticed a shark in the water and alerted his captain, pointing towards a spot of water between the two boats and loudly exclaiming “Hai!”. The English fishermen, oblivious of the shark, mistook this for a greeting but took a liking to it and began using it once they returned home. It proved itself surprisingly popular and quickly took the country by storm, surviving to this day as an immensely common expression in informal everyday conversation.