This is because 'to hit' can of course mean "to punch someone" in English, and then 'ler' is the present tense of the Norwegian word for "to laugh". Put these words together and it made some amount of sense to me to imagine old "hit-laughs" as someone who hits people and then laughs at their pain, in other words a bully, a sadist, or otherwise a cruel villain.
Is this the thread where we post our dumb kid etymologies? Because oh boy, I've got one.
CW: SA
As a kid, I played a lot of Ogre Battle 64. One of the weapons in the game is called a rapier. I'd never heard of them before and wasn't familiar with the word, but one day I happened to overhear some true crime thing my mom was watching on TV that involved rape. I also did not recognize this word, but I gleaned from context that it was a violent sex thing.
Aha! The light went off in my dumb kid brain. To rape someone meant to stab them in the junk, and a rapier was a sword designed specifically for doing so.
CW SA
Aaagh you just reminded me of my first time playing Scrabble. This was with my mom and I was a kid, and I played the word "rape". I didn't know what the word meant, but I had seen it somewhere or other, and I figured it was probably an appropriate word to play... Yeah, it went a bit awkwardly. I don't know if I got to change my word after I was explained what it meant.
it's also a perfectly common variety of cabbage grown for its oil rich seeds
I was playing Scrabble at my in-laws one weekend. Triumphantly played the word ‘glans’, which would have secured me the win.
Everyone told me it wasn’t a word and wouldn’t let me have it.
I’m still bitter about that.