Grammar girl here.

Last week my husband excitedly told me that he had a great idea for an app.

I must have been tired because I thought he said he had a great idea for a nap, as in

sleeping during the daytime.

We both ended up laughing, but it also reminded me of a story about how certain words came

to be as they are in English.

So I thought I'd share that story with you today.

The most commonly told story of language change because of misunderstandings like an

app is the story of the word apron.

You see originally it was called a napron N-A-P-R-O-N.

If you go all the way back to Latin, you can trace the roots of the word apron to the word

MAPA, M-A-P-P-A, which meant both tablecloth and MAP because if you spread a large map out

on a table, it's a lot like a tablecloth.

The French of the Middle Ages took up the word, replaced the M with an N and called it a

napron N-A-P-E-R-O-N.

From there, Middle English dropped the E and used napron.

But sometime in the 1400s or 1500s, when people said a napron, enough people were mishearing

the break between A and napron that the common phrase became an apron, and napron fell

out of favor and eventually disappeared.

This whackiness of mishearing creating new words has a few different names.

It's called misdivision, metanalysis, and rebracting.

English got the word adder the same way.

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