WHERE does that come from?!

Mare Tranquillitatis

Mare Nectaris

I believe I need a book precisely detailing where and how words come into being. Looking up weird words in an etymology text would:

A)    Be a great and fascinating way to while away my occasional sleepless nights.
B)    I WANNA KNOW why, fer instance mare has three radically different meanings.

Mare – it’s a noun and, in Astronomy refers to any of the several large, dark plains on the moon and Mars: Galileo believed that the lunar features were seas when he first saw them through a telescope.

The wheels were large and open, and absorbed the unevenness of the mare; Malenfant felt as if he were riding across the Moon in a soap bubble. Stephen Baxter, Manifold: Space, 2000

How do we get from there to a mare being an adult, female horse? Or, for that matter, how can mare also mean an evil, nasty-ass dream sparking, preternatural scary thing?

MORE ETYMOLOGY PLZ!

Pettifog
verb
     to bicker or quibble over trifles or unimportant matters.

No. This sounds a fuck-ton more like petit four – a wee cake served at meal’s end (as opposed to a full blown desert) . What IS a pettifog, really? It’s a cocktail that, when first poured into a lovely, chilled coupe glass, looks like a thick, mysterious, swirling fog. There’s an air of double, double toil and trouble about it and yes, the drink’s strong so DO NOT order a double.

But here…I like the actual dictionary definition’s etymology:
Pettifogger is a compound of the adjective petty “of minor importance” and fogger “a middleman.” Fogger itself probably derives ultimately from Fugger, the name of a prominent family of German bankers of the 15th and 16th centuries. The family name became a common noun in German and Dutch, meaning “rich man, monopolist, usurer.”

Huh, just as the name Trump is or will be synonymous with grifting whore and/or lying sack of shit. OR fetid pool of diseased weasel feces. Just FYI and shit.

Animus
noun
     strong dislike or enmity; hostile attitude; animosity.

I understand this word’s meaning but always think of it as specific to, ya know, animals. Like: Skitter holds terrible animus for our visitor cats. If she’s downstairs when they arrive for dinner she stands up on two legs, battering the patio door with her fierce, angry, fisted paws.

Cozen
verb
     to deceive, cheat or trick

RILLY? No, I don’t think so. This sounds way more like what one does to make your home all comfy and snuggly – ya know, COZY.

How did it get from cozy to Trump-ish (i.e.: lying sack of shit)?

One plausible etymology has cozen associated with the noun cousin (i.e., the relative), modeled on the French usage of the verb cousiner “to call ‘cousin,’” i.e., to claim fraudulent kindred to gain some profit or advantage. A second etymology derives cozen from Italian cozzonare “to engage in horse trading, cheat,” from cozzone, from Latin coctiōn-, the inflectional stem of coctiō “a dealer, broker.” Cozen entered English in the 16th century.

Huh, OK.

Evenfall
noun
     twilight, dusk, the beginning of evening

No fuss from me over this word. I love its poeticism, the way it conjures that beautiful time of day, just before the cloak of night falls.

And now ‘tis evenfall in the brave and beautiful Borderland, and long shadows fall across the smooth lawns and fragrant garden ... George MacDonald Fraser, The Reavers

Petrichor
noun
     a distinctive scent, usually described as earthy, pleasant, or sweet, produced by rainfall on very dry ground.

I only mention it BUT the word petrichor has zero art to it. It does NOT inspire memories of a spring rain’s perfume as it falls on parched ground. Nope, the word sounds way more like what I’d smell after pulling into a filling a station – eau de gas station toilette

Futilitarian
noun
     a person who believes that human hopes are vain, and human strivings unjustified.

Related: Kill-Joy

A lot of artists in America tend to be self-deprecating futilitarians, because we’ve grown up in a culture in which art doesn’t matter except, occasionally, as a high-end investment. Tim Kreider, When Art Is Dangerous (or Not),  New York Times

Onomastic
adjective
     of or relating to proper names.

Wut? This isn’t something about onanism? Ya know…like…She had a stone onomastic time last night with her brand-y new bunny eared cliterator.

Huh.

Oh wait, I know – that’d be onatastic. Right? Sorry, my bad.

Attractancy
noun
     the capacity, especially of a pheromone, to attract.

Her attractancy quotient was off the bloody charts!

Nope, this is a biochemistry term, dryly used as in: The attractancy of the brown-rot fungus was discovered by Dr. Glenn Esenther, an entomologist at the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin. ……zzzzzzzzzzzz.

Self-own
noun and/or verb
     someone inadvertently embarrassing themselves, especially by doing something that backfires on them.

Preznint Dicktator-Loving Clueless Snowflake does this on the regular ‘cept, since he only watches (and takes his lessons from) the officious, bumptious and sycophantic Fox “News,” he doesn’t get it.

***All real versus imagined definitions come from Dictionary.com's Word of the Day page***