This is not the place for intuition

[oloriel]

Dear self,

Please not to get into etymological discussions with the only exam professor you actually know reasonably well. Especially not if everything you say is based on linguistic intuition, not on any factual knowledge, and he's the sort of professor who actually possesses a lot of factual knowledge. Ponderings are for livejournal, not for mock exams. 'k? K. Thanks.

Yours,
Self

- - -
Backstory:
We had a presentation about Early Modern English lexis today, and among other thing the process of word formation by suffixation, and it was mentioned that the most productive suffixes in the EModE period were still native, not loaned, and that said most productive suffixes were -ness, -er, -ed and -y, and the prof asked for examples, and the presenter said "Well, 'city' for example."
Which is of course nonsense, because 'city' comes from cité, which is very much French, and in fact most if not all words in English that end in -ty are anglicisations of French words that end in -té, which French in turn francified from Latin -tas.
'City' being wrong, the prof asked for correct examples, which the presenters didn't know, so he turned to the plenum, which usually means that for some reason he looks at me and goes "Hm?".
Pffff.
"'Happy' and 'lucky' and such, I guess," says I.
"Yes," says he, "luck and lucky, exactly. Happy, I don't know. Hap. I don't think there's hap."
Here I should have shrugged, because who cares. But of course my inner Fëanorian had to speak up.
"Well, there's 'hapless' and 'mishap', so perhaps --- 'perhaps' too, come to think of it - so there might have been a word 'hap', right?"
"Well, maybe," he says, sounding unconvinced, and after that my inner Fëanorian fortunately kept quiet.

As it happens I was actually right - and I bet that's where happen and all its derivatives come from, too. But dude. SHUT UP. Unless you are absolutely certain. I mean, these colloquium presentations are mock exams. You don't randomly throw around information you aren't certain about in an oral exam, unless pressed to do so. There are surely a dozen examples safer than 'happy'.
Augh.

And because that's the kind of thing he does, he'll probably have looked it up as well, and now I'll get even more questioning looks and friendly "Hm?"s because now I'm the neighbourhood etymology specialist on top of everything, too. Great. Just what I need. Yet higher expectations. >.