Class divisions are always the cause of some enemity and spite, but the source of villain is almost beyond imagination. Stemming from Latin and the word villanus, this term for "one who is evil" originally meant "farmhand", or quite literally "one from a village". Once Latin died out and all that political disruption abated a tad, the French went along and blatantly plagiarized the word (those darn villains!) to create villein, or "peasant," not much of a difference from before. This, as a lot of French words did, crossed the Channel to England and became villain, which still meant "peasant" in Middle English. Then the nasty switch occurred. The English aristocracy was characteristically snobby and looked down at all lower classes with disdain. The villains, specifically, being echelons below knights, were supposed to have much less honor than knights. These honor-less villians then supposedly went around robbing, raping, and pillaging (some of which was true, but the branding is still unfair). Thus a word for "peasant" began to mean "criminal" and, as the term consolidated, it began referring mostly to "evil masterminds". How villainous a transition!

Never confuse these words. That's the main reason of this post. NEVER. Etymology is the study of origins of words, entomology is the study of insects and both kinds of researchers will laugh at you if you confuse the two; they are even etymologically different. Anyway, entomology dates back to Greek,  with the word entemos, meaning "chopped up into little pieces".  Since those ancient Greeks were very weird guys, they examined bugs closely and their first reaction was that they all seem to have a cut or notch at the waist, so the word entemon came into play, meaning "bug". Entomologie then popped up in France during those halcyon Enlightenment days, because with the renewal of reasoning and science came scientific words, including the union of entemon "bug" and -logie "the study of". Entomologie then crossed the English Channel into, well, England and English as Entomology. This -logie to -logy change is the same for virtually every single French to English scientific word transition, so that's an easy thing to notice. Again: NEVER CONFUSE THESE TWO WORDS.

The word valedictorian was invented in the early seventeenth century and meant "to take leave". It stems from the Latin word vale, meaning "farewell", and dicere, meaning "to speak". Let's break it up a bit further. Vale is a conjugated form of valere, which derives from the Proro-Indo-European word wal, "to be strong". This is also the source of the -wald part of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them antagonist Grindelwald and the father of today's word valiant. The second part of valedictorian, dicere, is also Latin from PIE, where it was deik, to point out. Through a bunch of etymological corruption, this word also birthed the predecessor for teacher, digit, and our word, dicere. Dicere, which may sound familiar because it itself is also the root for Spanish decir and English diction, meant "to speak or tell" and when combined with vale described a "goodbye speech" and eventually just a goodbye. It's really fascinating how many words are hidden in valedictorian, how "strong teacher" is related to "Grindelwald's digit". Etymology is awesome!

As schoolchildren, we all learn that America got its name from the great explorer, Amerigo Vespucci. This is true, but let's go a little more in-depth. In 1507, Martin Waldseemüller made a famous map of what was believed to be the Americas (it's great, check it out). Since he was the first guy to chart this, he needed a name for it, and he labeled it after a Latinized version of Vespucci's name. Amerigo, the name in question, is Germanic, and derives from the Gothic name Amalrich, which meant "work-ruler" and also gave us the more common first names of Amelia and possibly Emily (though the latter has Latin roots as well). The word American, describing at first those who were natives of North America and now just means anyone from the USA, comes from Americanus, which was a Latin word invented in the sixteenth century (a notable occurrence). This origin was especially ironic in the 1960s to 80s, where anti-communist fervor gripped the nation that was named after a pretty comunistic thing.

I'm never going to look at an orchid the same way again. These beautiful flowers actually can be traced back to the Greek word orkhis, which meant "testicle". The next place the word cropped up was in Latin, where it became orchis the flower. How did this transtion occur? While it clearly did occur, there are two competing schools of thought on the how of it, both of which make sense. The first idea is that there was a greek myth about a man named Orchis who behaved a little too lewdly and got turned into a plant by gods, thus establishing a link between testosterone and plants. The other is based off the testicular shape of the roots of an orchid, which may have caused this transition. Anyway, over a thousand years later, when Linnaeus was classifying life of all kinds, he accidentally got the Latin root a little wrong and it became orchidacanae, which today is shortened to orchid for all non-botanists. This etymological change is kind of nice, really, because of the shift from something ugly to something quite gorgeous.

The earliest appearance of cheese was in Poland in 5,500 BCE. Curiously enough, this is much before the word for it was invented, since Proto-Indo-European came around a thousand years later. Though etymologists are befuddled and bemused by the root of this word, the common theory is that it comes from the PIE word kwat, meaning "sour", due to the sourness of cheese resulting from fermentation (this word was picked up and kept by many Slavic languages as the name for a sour mineral-water-like drink, so they're basically drinking cheese). After about 4,000 years of being mangled beyond any recognition, the word reemerged in Latin, with its current definition, as caseus. If you've taken a foriegn language, this might sound familiar: it was also the forebear of the Irish, Italian, and Spanish words for cheese. This went into German as kajsus, and later appeared in Saxon as cese, another inexplicable mutilation of a word. In Old English, they added an h to make chese, and eventually, since everybody was mispronouncing it anyway, chese became cheese. The ancient root of "sour" still exists in some cheeses, but culinary technique now also gave us wonderful, sweet, and myriad cheeses of all kinds.