Cant

No matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney.

― Rube Goldberg

"We need to unpack that."

Whenever I hear anyone mouth those words, I want to unpack the trunk where I keep my souvenir shillelagh, so I can pummel him.

The meiotic use of "unpack"―what the speaker really means is, "That's ridiculous"―is a prime example of cant.

Dictionaries define cant as "a stock phrase" or "the insincere use of pious words." 

The verb form means "to talk hypocritically" or "to speak in a singsong manner."

Etymologists believe cant derived from the Latin cantare, meaning “to chant.” 

In medieval cathedrals, the cantor directed the chants. That solemn duty required the cantor be ordained; but, with the Reformation, the requirement was dropped. Bach and Telemann, both Protestant laymen, were cantors.

Numerous claims notwithstanding, etymologists do not believe cant derived from Andrew Cant, a 17th century Scottish preacher known for his preposterous sermonizing. 

Cant

That rumor was started a century later by Bishop George Smalridge, who, worried about a wave of "ungentlemanly" canting in Britain's churches, wrote in The Spectator:

"'Cant' is, by some people, derived from one Andrew Cant, who, they say, was a Presbyterian minister in some illiterate part of Scotland, who by exercise and use had obtained the faculty, alias gift, of talking in the pulpit in such a dialect that it's said he was understood by none but his own congregation, and not by all of them."

You could simplify matters by saying cant means "baloney."

It's remarkable: we open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries are unknown to us.

I can imagine, a century from now, etymologists insisting the word trump derived from a forgotten 21st century US president. 

Trump

They will cite as their primary source an obscure "blog" (blogs were a quaint form of self-publishing on the archaic jumble of plastic and wire known as the "Internet").

Dictionaries then―as they do now―will define trump as "a card with the highest value in a game."

The verb form will mean "to beat someone" or "to be better, more important, or more powerful than another."

Twenty-second century dictionaries will also define trump as "one-upmanship" or "the art of outdoing a rival by claiming superiority, often insisting one is smarter, richer, and more popular."

Secondary definitions of trump will include "malignant narcissist," "white supremacist" and "TV star" (TV was the predominant form of entertainment before the invention in 2120 of the orgasmatron.)