Yesterday, I saw a link on Synlogos to a John C. Wright post titled simply "Eautology," and I clicked just to see what the word was supposed to mean. On first seeing it, I mentally pronounced it as a homophone of otology, thinking the first element must be eau, the French for "water." I guessed the t was added for euphony, or perhaps in reference to Scientology (cf. Blaintology, the cult led by David Blaine in South Park).
No sooner had I thought that than I knew it was impossible. John C. Wright tends, as I'm sure he would be the first to admit, to be be a bit prissy on matters linguistic, and there is simply no way in the shades below that he would ever dream of coining a word by sticking a Greek suffix on a French noun and inserting a random t in the middle. That's just something that will never, ever happen. It's not the way the universe operates.
I skimmed enough of the post to find out that eautology is actually from the Greek reflexive pronoun εαυτός, which I suppose I should have been able to guess on my own. I left a comment, which you can see there, saying, "I thought it was going to be the study of water!"
Of course the proper term for the study of water, with none of that unseemly Graeco-French miscegenation, is hydrology.
Less than 24 hours after skimming "Eautology" and leaving that comment, I was reading -- such are my omnivorous habits -- The Remarkable Record of Job (1988) by Henry M. Morris, which is a young-earth creationist take on that book of the Bible and is perhaps most notable for its memorable theory that the Leviathan described in Job 41 was actually a fire-breathing duck-billed dinosaur. The picture below is not from the book -- other YECs have since picked up on it -- but I'm pretty sure Morris was the OG.
Chapter 3 is called "Modern Scientific Insights in Job," and I started it today. I was surprised to find this on p. 36:
