Seeing different word meanings

There are many words where the meaning looks like it should mean one thing, but actually have meanings that don't seem to match that impression... if you catch my drift. Words that appear to be apples, when they are in fact oranges.

I have a little list of works that often make me smile. For example:

• Benchmark: crushed carpet, or floor marks caused by benches
• Chancery: the act of taking a chance
• Bemuse: to become someone's muse
• Wizen: to become wise, or wizardish
• Nonplussed: cannot be totalled
• Cacophony: a chocolate telephone
• Inkling: a small biro cartoon
• Swordfish: catching fish with a sword 
• Halitosis: having a toxic, sentient computer on your spaceship (Clarke, 1968). Actually, this last one is interesting. It sounds Latin-derived, and we assume it means bad breath... possibly arising from dental caries. However, apparently "there’s no such thing as halitosis. It was a made up medical condition coined by the owner of Listerine in the 1920s [...] , company owner Jordan Wheat Lambert decided to [...] market his product as a cure for bad breath. To convince the public that they needed Listerine, Lambert scoured the dictionary and happened upon an old Latin word meaning breath, halitus, which he decided to stylize as halitosis to make it sound like a legitimate medical condition" (Smallwood, 2018) running Listerine ads for hundred years.

There are many more where these came from. There is nothing like having a bit of fun, in seeing the ridiculous in our own language.

Sam

References:

Clarke, A. C. (1968). 2001: A space odyssey. Hutchinson.

Smallwood, K. (2018, April 18). 10 Words That Don’t Really Mean Anything. Top 10s. https://www.toptenz.net/10-words-that-dont-really-mean-anything.php