On 6/5/2013 9:09 AM, Michel Boucher wrote:

> There was a to-do many many years ago back when John George
> Diefenbaker was still alive over the welcome sign to the town of
> Tisdale, SK, which read "Tisdale the land of rape and honey."
> Feminists objected to the glorification of rape on a town sign,
> obviously unaware (or perhaps aware and ignoring it) that the
> rape referred to here was a plant whose name came from the latin
> for turnip, "rapa". Ignoring etymology will, as I've said
> elsewhere, get you into all sorts of trouble.

Reminds me of an article I read in the late 1990s (when the Internet
had only recently become known to the masses). The idiot author
denounced the male denizens of the Internet for objectifying women by
referring to photos they'd share of women as 'gifts'. The author took
that to mean that they were 'giving' each other symbolic 'ownership'
of the women in the photos.
The _idiot_ author reached this conclusion by assuming that the file
extension .gif stood for 'gift'.