'Etymology'

While you take in hand to school others, and to teach them by what name a whale-fish is to be called in our tongue, leaving out, through ignorance, the letter H, which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word, you deliver that which is not true.

- Richard Hackluyt*, Principal Navigations (in Melville, Moby-Dick: 'Etymology - Supplied by a Late Consumptive Usher to a Grammar School')

--
* wonderfully misspelled by Melville, in all his sanctimony

Etymological smack-down!

On the naming of Batticaloa:

It has much rice, principally in a district that lies on the side of the island that faces the east, called Calou, that is "kingdom," by reason of which rice, which they call bate, the kingdom is called Batecalou, which they interpret as the "kingdom of rice" [4].

- Joao De Barros, The history of Ceylon: From the earliest times to 1600 AD

That said:

[4] This is one of the most amusing of Barros's etymological atrocities. Of course, Sinh. bat is boiled rice; and neither in Sinh. nor in Tam. is there a word like calou meaning "kingdom."

- Donald Ferguson, Barros's translator and editor

Notes on a Tuesday (splendid etymology)

Dienstag - From Middle Low German dingesdach, the day of the ding (“the thing, a council assembly”).

- Wiktionary.org

['S like something out of The Thick of It. 'Can you make it to my expenses-wangling party on Tuesday, Tony?' 'No, sorry - I've got that thing, haven't I.']