Cunning, Linguistics
The word linguist probably entered the English language some time during the 1500s. Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, printed in 1623 but probably written in the 1590s, contains this memorable set of lines:
Have you the tongues?
And later, in that same scene:
A Linguist, and a man of such perfection,
As we doe in our quality much want.
Lingua means tongue in Latin, and this is clear today in the way that we might say someone knows a foreign tongue. A linguist, therefore, was someone skilled in languages.
Add an -ic to the end, and you get linguistic, which appears in print in the 1820s.
This has been the etymology of linguistics. All etymology is linguistics, but not all linguistics is etymology. Etymology is the study of the origin of one word, while linguistics is the study of all things language related, just like physics is the study of all things physical, or economics is the study of economies.
Clever title, you dawg!
"Lingua means tongue in Latin, and this is clear today in the way that we might say someone knows a foreign tongue. A linguist, therefore, was someone skilled in languages."
Which is why a commonly used professional vocabulary, for example, is referred to as a "lingua franca".