Ok, time for something more bite-sized: the word muscle.
Muscle has a pretty straight-forward origin: it goes back to Middle French muscle, which itself is from Latin mūsculus, meaning... "small mouse". I don't quite get it either.
The funny thing is though, this comparison isn't even exclusive to Latin. The Romans actually calqued it from Greek, thinking it made perfect sense. Russian has мышца myshtsa of the same meaning, Persian has ماهیچه mâhiche "little fish", so on and so forth. For some reason a lot of Indo-European languages seem to enjoy comparing muscles to little animals.
Muscle has a pretty straight-forward origin: it goes back to Middle French muscle, which itself is from Latin mūsculus, meaning... "small mouse". I don't quite get it either.
The funny thing is though, this comparison isn't even exclusive to Latin. The Romans actually calqued it from Greek, thinking it made perfect sense. Russian has мышца myshtsa of the same meaning, Persian has ماهیچه mâhiche "little fish", so on and so forth. For some reason a lot of Indo-European languages seem to enjoy comparing muscles to little animals.