Every charming word origin I repeat turns out to be false, is there a thirty second test for spotting them

Three tests that will catch most of them without opening a book. First, acronyms: if the claimed origin is an acronym and the word is older than roughly the twentieth century, it is essentially always false, because acronyms as a way of making words are a modern habit and pre modern people did not think that way about initials. Second, the single named originator: real word histories are usually gradual, dialectal and messy, so a story that pins a word on one identifiable person at one identifiable dinner party is doing narrative work rather than historical work. Third, the too tidy explanation of an oddity: if the story exists mainly to explain why a word is spelled strangely or why it means two things, be suspicious, because the story was probably reverse engineered from the oddity.

The one real test, if you have thirty seconds and a phone, is dates. Find the earliest recorded use, then compare it to the date the story requires. A startling number of these collapse instantly because the word turns out to be attested a century before the event that supposedly created it, or the word appears in print decades after the practice it supposedly describes had ended. You do not need to be right about the true origin to know a story is wrong, you only need one date that does not fit.

The uncomfortable version of the rule: the reason the charming stories feel true is that they are better constructed than the truth. Real etymologies are frequently boring, frequently uncertain, and often end with scholars disagreeing. Anything that arrives complete, with a beginning, a middle, a punchline and no loose ends, has been shaped by retelling. Actual history has loose ends.

Acronym, one named person, or a story that neatly explains a spelling. Any of the three and assume false until a dictionary with citations says otherwise.

I repeated one of these in a talk to about eighty people and got a very polite email afterwards with three citations attached. What it cost me was not the embarrassment, it was that I stopped trusting my own stock of fun facts for about a year, because I could not tell which of the others had come from the same bad source. If you have a mental collection of these, it is worth auditing the whole set at once rather than one at a time.