Language Of Confusion: Feeling Strapped

There are so many weird words related to this one. You’re in for a time.
 
First of all, strap, a band of leather, showed up in the early seventeenth century from Scottish, of all languages. It’s thought to be from the Old French estrop, strap, and before that the classical Latin stroppus, which means strap like part of a slingshot. That’s actually from the Greek strophos, rope, from the verb strephein, to turn, from the Proto Indo European strebh-, to wind or turn. So because rope is twisted/turned, we have strap.
 
And that little word gives us so much weirdness. You know what’s from there? Catastrophe. Seriously! It showed up in the mid sixteenth century meaning a reversal of what’s expected, not meaning a disaster until 1748. It comes from the classical Latin catastropha (a reversal or catastrophe), and Greek katastrophe, disaster or undoing. The kata means down or against, and the rest is from strephein, so a catastrophe is turning against. Somehow that makes sense.
 
And from the same place is of course apostrophe. It showed up in the mid sixteenth century, a bit after catastrophe, from the French apostrophe, (same meaning, obvs), from the Late Latin apostrophus and Greek apostrophos prosoidia, which means apostrophe and literally translates to “the accent of turning away”. Yeah, somehow that meant a mark to show that a letter is missing—like it is being shortened to it’s, the apostrophe shows the missing i. Apo- means off or away from, and the rest is to turn, so an apostrophe is a mark that takes a letter away.
 
All right, how about strobe? It didn’t show up until 1942, but it was short for stroboscope, which showed up in 1896. That’s scope with the Greek strobos, twisting or whirling, which is obviously from strebh-. A strobe is a constantly whirling light! And there’s one more we’re going to look at: streptococcus. Yes, it’s from the same place. It showed up in 1877 as the bacteria genus, with the strepto- used by scientists when they wanted to say “twisted” but wanted to use Latin so they sound academic. It’s from the Greek streptos, twisted, which is from strephein. Fun fact, the cocco- part of the word means berry or seed, which is from kokkos, agranule or seed in Greek. Streptococcus is a twisted granule. And it sucks to come down with it.
 
Sources
Online Etymology Dictionary
Google Translate
Omniglot
University of Texas at Austin Linguistic Research Center
University of Texas at San Antonio’s page on Proto Indo European language
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Orbis Latinus