travesty

We often use travesty as a synonym for tragedy, but that's not quite right. Travesty comes from the same root as transvestite and originally referred to a man dressing up as a woman. He looks like a woman, but he's not. That's a travesty. That soon grew to mean anything disguised as something else.

The confusion with the word tragedy seems to have come from the phrase travesty of justice, which is something trying to pass itself off as justice, but really isn't. As is too often the case, when most people hear a new word (like fatuous), they won't look it up. They try to work out its meaning on their own. Thus, fatuous comes to mean infatuated, and travesty comes to mean tragedy. 

So travesty is actually itself a travesty of the word tragedy. 

Isn't this fun?

infantry

Here's one for all you macho infantry types. A gentry is a collection of gents. An armory is a collection of arms. Jewelry is a collection of jewels. What is an infantry, a collection of infants?

Yepper doodle.

"Infants" was a disparaging term the older, aristocratic cavalry * used for the poor, young peasants who made up the ranks of the foot soldier. Fortunately, the term infantry—like redneck, cowboy, hoosier, and other originally disparaging group labels—is a moniker used with pride by infantrymen the world over, even infantry officers like me who never fought on foot but served instead as members of the Hueydrivery.

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