Responding to the comments on tiffin (English for You, June 28, 2007), K K Subramaniam, Bangalore writes that tiffin originated from the phrase  ‘tea and bun’.  He adds: ‘In Tamil the word is written as tipun….While the English were content with tea and biscuits, our mamis and mamas broadened the menu to include dosa, idli, uppuma, coffee.’
To derive tiffin from tea and bun sounds plausible but it is not so.  It is an instance of what linguists call ‘folk-etymology’. The origin of tiffin has been traced to the dialect word tiffing (=sipping). But tiffing itself is of ‘unknown origin’, Henry Cecil Wyld, the foremost philologist of his day, says that tiffin is from tiff but gives no further information. He only notes that the word tiffin was ‘current among the English in India and the Far East.’ Brewer notes tiffin as ‘an old north of England provincialism’.   He adds: ‘In Anglo-Indian usage it denotes a light meal or lunch, especially of curried dishes, chutney and fruit.’
There is no doubt that tiffin as a light meal became established in colonial India, though its connection to tiffing (the English dialect word) remains unexplained. The forms to tiff, tiffing, and tiffings have all been recorded.
Folk-etymology is an interesting field. A most amusing example of folk-etymology is the derivation of apothecary. This word (now archaic) denoted ‘a chemist licensed to dispense medicines and drugs’. Apothecaries’ measure referred to units of weight and liquid volume formerly in use in Britain. The word derives from a Greek word meaning ‘storehouse’.
Folk-etymology derives the word from  ‘a –pot-he-carries.’ It was true they carried pots and so you get apothecary.
Hockett mentions a student of his who wanted to know whether affricates were so called because they are extremely common in the languages of Africa. (Affricate is a term from phonetics. The sound represented by ch (as in chair, chain) is an affricate.
Management jargon
The term Group Theory would suggest to most people something in mathematics like Matrix Algebra. But it is nothing so abstract or recondite as all that. It is a study of what happens when a group of people assigned to a particular job, meet and interact.
Actually there is an established term for this: group dynamics. But who knows? Group dynamics may now be an old, last century expression.  The current term, it appears, is group theory.
A writer in The Hindu (June 6, 2007) has given a sketch of this branch of knowledge. He isolates and defines five features of ‘group binding theory’. These are: Forming (=beginning), storming (=struggling), norming (=solidarity), performing (=accomplishing), and closing (=ending).
What does this say? Nothing more than that when a group of people meet, there will be some hesitancy in the beginning, followed by a sort of conflict (among some of them). Then they understand each other and settle down and finally actually do (=achieve) something.
But stated in the way I have done, it doesn’t sound anything like a profound analysis by an expert. For this you need to have some imposing technical terms—forming, storming, norming, performing, closing. Can anything be more pretentious and hollow? And anything more atrocious than ‘norming’?
It is amazing that stuff like this is dished out week after week, as the latest discoveries and insights in Business management. No amount of ridicule by lovers of good English seems to have any effect on the perpetrators of this hideous jargon.
Jargon apart, the Biz School people have their own syntax.  One school boldly advertises: Difficult was always easy. It was impossible that took some time. Enclosing difficult and impossible in quotes would have made it ordinary English. But that is exactly what is to be avoided in these halls of learning.
The same school has another slogan. Impossible is nothing. What does this mean? If it means:
‘Nothing is impossible’, why not say so?  Or does it mean that the content of ‘impossible’ is nothing, as in: You are nothing. (=You are a nobody, utterly useless)?
A sentence like You are nothing is possible only when the subject is a noun (phrase). And even then only in certain contexts. You can say: You are nothing. You cannot say (with any sense) Physics is nothing. In any case this interpretation makes no sense with: Impossible is nothing.
Most likely the man who said: ‘Impossible is nothing’ just translated into English, word for word, a sentence from his mother tongue (Hindi?).
Correction A reader has pointed out that the reference to Balakrishna Rao’s government (EFU June 28, 2007) should have been Bhaskar Rao’s government. The error is regretted; the correction appreciated.