Read the Label

At the gym there's a spray bottle of disinfectant and a bunch of towels. You know the drill: after you've finished sweating all over the exercise equipment, you sterilize it for the next masochist.

On the side of the bottle is this legend:

DO NOT DRINK / NO BEBER / NE PAS BOIRE

which doesn't seem nearly enough. What about "Do not inject into veins" or "Do not mist into eyes" or "Do not employ as a feminine hygiene spray"? I mean, just to cover as many bases as possible.

"Do not drink". Jeez. Could we be any more mollycoddled?

Anyway. The Spanish version of "to drink" is "beber", which I immediately recognized as being related to English "bibulous" and "imbibe". As it should be: they're all from the Latin "bibere", "to drink". (So, predictably, is the French "boire", even though it clearly took a few twists and turns to get to its present state.)

But wait just a minute. "Bibulous", which means "inclined to drink", sounds so much like various English words such as "bibliography" and "bible". How can this possibly be?

Because they're from two very different languages, that's how. The root of all the book-related "bib-" words in English is Greek, not Latin. Byblos was a port in Phoenecia where papyrus was made. The word came in Greek to mean a papyrus or a parchment, and eventually the books from which these substances were made. "Byblos" turned into "biblos", which became "biblion", "book", and that was the point at which Latin stole it and turned it into "biblia", from which Middle English derived "bible".