Yeah, it’s 100% not true*, but someone really went to some effort to invent this alternate etymology (which is so far from the reality, and so elaborate, I have to assume it was a very deliberate falsification, rather than folk etymology run amok).
*Looks like the origin is about the waste bits of food items, with a completely different root from “garb.”
It’s interesting, I’m constantly running across “facts” on social media that if I don’t think about them, they sound really plausible, and I just accept them (because they’re so earnestly presented), but if I start thinking about them, I realize they make absolutely no sense whatsoever. (There was some “fact” going around about how some part of a pepper fruit indicate something about its gender, that I both saw online and people IRL repeated to me. Thing is, most plants aren’t male or female, peppers are not one of the few that are, and if it was, only the female would produce fruit, and the idea of fruit having gender doesn’t make any sense at all.) I understand how these things spread (“neat little factoid!”), but I have no idea how they get started. Mansplaining probably plays a role… I expect these little false factoids will multiply now that “AI” has been unleashed, since they’re the ultimate mansplainers.
