A Found Sonnet with no Author Attribution...

A style of verse, with many varied forms, the form of Shakespeare being as proceeds: A set of fourteen lines, each meeting norms of length and stress, with certain rhymes agreed. Exactly five feet are there in each line, and yes, two syllables in every foot, the second only stressed. These, when combined, five iambs form. (Guess what I cannot put!) Four stanzas are there, three quite similar, with four lines each, the rhyming being so: The endings of the first and third concur, as do the second and the fourth; Although the last has only two lines to its name, and, lacking so, both rhymes must be the same Took a crack at the form, only to discover that the rules are more flexible than I had originally thought-- as Billy Collins demonstrates here:  All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now, and after this one just a dozen to launch a little ship on love's storm-tossed seas, then only ten more left like rows of beans. How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan and insist the iambic bongos must be played and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines, one for every station of the cross. But hang on here wile we make the turn into the final six where all will be resolved, where longing and heartache will find an end, where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen, take off those crazy medieval tights, blow out the lights, and come at last to bed. But any way you approach it, you're pretty much playing an outdated game--ill suited to the age of chatting and tweeting but I don't have a Twitter account, so I'll soldier on and see what this natural punster can do with this form and will post results if something I deem worthy emerges...meantime...

Old buddy Tim informed me this weekend that the Latin derivation for the word luggage (or baggage) is Impedimenta.  That reignited my desire to resume my never ending search for derivations with interesting backstories.  What follows was cobbled together from online sites--though I'll take credit for Art Direction. 

Assassin

During the time of the Crusades the members of a certain secret Muslim sect engaged people to terrorise their Christian enemies by performing murders as a religious duty. These acts were carried out under the influence of hashish, and so the killers became known as hashshashin, meaning eaters or smokers of hashish. Hashshashin evolved into the word assassin.

Avocado (Avocado Pear)

Originally the Aztecs called this fruit ahucatl after their word for testicle. This is may be partly due to the fruit's resemblance to a testicle, but also because it was supposedly believed to be an aphrodisiac. To the Spaniards ahucatl sounded like avocado (=advocate, Spanish), and so the fruit came to Europe, via Spain, under that name.

Hazard

This term evolved from the Arabic al zahr, which means the dice. In Western Europe the term came to be associated with a number of games using dice, which were learned during the Crusades whilst in the Holy Land. The term eventually took on the connotation of danger because, from very early on, games using dice were associated with the risky business of gambling and con artists using corrupted dice.

Malaria

This word comes from the mediaeval Italian mal (=bad) and aria (=air), describing the miasma from the swamps around Rome. This 'bad air' was believed to be the cause of the fever that often developed in those who spent time around the swamps. This was all before the illness, now known as malaria, was discovered to be caused by certain protozoans present in the mosquitos that bred around these swamps.

Pedigree

Believed to be derived from the French ped de gru, which meant crane's foot (the modern French equivalent is pied de la grue). The crane's foot is said to resemble the/|\ symbol on genealogical trees. It has also been suggested that it comes from par degrés, the French for by degrees. A pedigree chart records the relationship of families by degrees.

Phony (or Phoney)

British thieves and swindlers of old used many secret codewords. One such word was fawney, which referred to a gilt ring. They would sell these, saying that they were made of real gold. But the rings were not gold, and the word phony – from fawney – came to be used for anything that is fake.

Quarantine

From the French quarante (=forty). Adding the suffix –aine to French numbers gives a degree of roughness to the figure (like –ish in English), so quarantaine means "about forty." When a ship arriving in port was suspected of being infected with a malignant, contagious disease, its cargo and crew were obliged to forego all contact with the shore for a period of around forty days. This term came to be known as period of quarantine.