‘Why is there water all over the bathroom floor?’ asked my husband, without doing anything about it. It was my fault. During a bank holiday soak, I heard the Radio 4 book serialisation of Hands of Time by Rebecca Struthers say that ‘the origin of the modern word hour’ is the Egyptian god Horus. I rocketed up a few inches, like a surprised killer whale, then flopped back down, displacing a few cubic inches of water each side.

It’s funny how ordinary words attract erroneous stories. Hour does not, of course, come from Horus. Few English words come from ancient Egyptian; pharaoh and oasis are exceptions. Hour derives from Norman French houre, from Latin hora, itself from Greek hōra, going back to an Indo-European root signifying ‘season’, giving us year and the Germans Jahr. We started using hour after the Norman conquest, the Old English being tid, ‘tide’. The sea’s tide was a later development of the same word; ‘time and tide wait for no man’ originally used tide in the sense ‘time’, not ‘sea-tide’.

Anyway, why should anyone think hour came from Horus? The falcon-headed god had one eye the sun and the other the moon, but that does not get us there. Neither the Egyptians nor pre-modern etymologists suggested Horus related to hora. Good old Isidore of Seville in his 7th-century Etymologies makes a stab at the origin of hora, ‘hour’, being the same as that of ora ‘boundary’, though it isn’t. Sir Thomas Browne, 1,000 years later, never mentions Horus that I can find. That does not stop internet language chat sites. One advocate of the hour-Horus connection spoils it by then explaining the origin of a religious minister: ‘Min was the common name of the moon, in fact it is where we derive the word moon. And Ster, is really star. So when we refer to someone as a Minister, we are really saying Moon-Star.’ Another speculates on the Turkish for ‘cock’: ‘I was wondering if Turkish horoz, Azeri khoruz, Kazakh qoraz, Kyrgyz koroz, Uyghur khoraz, and Uzbek khoroz could be related to Horus.’ They shouldn’t be wondering, but one can’t stop people trying.