An Excursion into Folk Etymology

A few hours ago I was looking up the meaning of the place-name 'Hinderclay' in Ekwall's Dictionary of English Place-Names, and got diverted to the name Hinderwell (North Yorks). It wasn't the meaning of the name that intrigued me, but Ekwall's use of a 19-letter word 'scandinavianisation'.  "Ha-ha !" I chuckled to myself.  "I bet that hasn't found its way into the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary".  So I looked it up - and it had !  Does that show that the editors of the SOED conscientiously read through all their Oxford University Press publications trawling for unexpected words (perhaps one in every few hundred pages) ?

The two most likely explanations are (a) that in fact lots of people speak or write about scandinavianisation, but I hadn't realised it; or (b) that all major publications are now digitalised, so it only takes the press of a couple of keys on the OUP computer to bring the word on to their screen. I don't like Ekwall's term at all. To me it smacks of invasive superlatinisationality or even hypersymbolorrhoea.  And of course Eilert Ekwall was a Scandinavian.

As for Hinderclay, I wanted to believe that it was the coinage of medieval farmers who found the local soil just to thick and claggy to plough. Ekwall didn't want to buy that one, but I rather think his own discursion on the matter is less than convincing.

An Excursion into Folk Etymology