Etymology

So I'm sitting down by the Potomac yesterday having what was probably the most relaxing day I've had in months. I mean I did absolutely nothing yesterday and it was wonderful. I went to Panera and read a book then I left to go down by the river to just chill and watch the boats go by. It was peaceful as hell until this grasshopper jumped on me and scared the hell out of me.

Laugh if you want, but I don't do bugs. If it had been a snake or a rat or something, I would've picked it up with my bare hands and tossed it somewhere. But a bug…nope. So anyway, I started thinking to myself...

Why do we call them grasshoppers? I'm not stupid. It makes sense. They hop around in the grass…grasshoppers. I'm just saying that when I look at an elephant I don't think, "Hey it's elephanting. That's why it's called an elephant." I know that words have different origins and The English language is lazy at times, but I just wonder at what point in the "assigning names to things" process did someone look at the ground, see a green thing jumping around and say…"That's a grasshopper."

There are two ways to look at it. Perhaps it was at the infancy of the "naming things" movement. It was a new craft and no one really had a handle on things so they were just keeping it simple. If that's the case then as they gained more experience their creativity evolved. It started slow with grasshopper and then they saw a cricket and were like "Shit, that thing hops too. Hmmm, what's that sound it's making? Sounds like it's cricking. Crick-et!" Soon they got the hang of it and started fancying things up…"Caterpillar!"

On the other hand, it could've gone the other way. Maybe they started with fancy names like "Iguana" and eventually just got lazy. "Fuck it, I'm calling that a 'fly' because that's what it does." Somebody else was like, "But what about those things up in the tree?" Somebody slapped him and said, "they're birds!"
"But that doesn't make any sense! They fly too..." (Slapped in face again)
"I said…they're birds! Those are birds, and these are flies"
"Okay, so what are we, walks?"
(Slapped again!)

I'm guessing it went something like that.