By early 2001, an e-mail was circulating with a disturbing claim about an ordinary word. It said picnic began as an abbreviation of a racist phrase used at lynchings. The message presented itself as a little-known piece of Black history, and cited the Smithsonian.

The atrocity it invoked was real. The etymology is not.

Why it's wrong. The word's history is long, French, and well recorded. Etymonline traces piquenique in French to the 1640s; its first known appearance is as the name of a character in a satirical poem of 1649. The word came into English in 1748, in Lord Chesterfield's Letters. At first it didn't even mean eating outdoors. A picnic was a fashionable social gathering, sometimes indoors, where every guest brought something to share. The outdoor meal came later.

All of this predates the claimed lynching origin by more than a century. Snopes examined the e-mail in January 2001 and rated it false: neither the word nor the idea of a picnic came from lynchings.

What's actually known. The English word is borrowed from French pique-nique. Within French, its first bearer was a fictional character, Pique-Nique, in a 1649 poem about a hard-drinking company. Etymonline suggests the name described someone making rude, defiant gestures, and that within a few decades only the idea of sharing the cost of a meal survived.

The myth is worth knowing about because it's still shared, usually by people trying to do the right thing. But the history it describes belongs to another subject, not to this word.