First, I'm going to use the term "folk etymology" to describe this phenomenon. I'm not sure what the proper academic term would be (in English or Russian), so if anyone here can enlighten me, that would be great!

Anyway, when I was in Russia, I encountered some people that insisted that insisted that most Russian words are just made up of abbreviations of other words. One girl said to me that the word любовь comes from "люди бога ведают". She mentioned a couple other examples, I can't remember them all, but one that shocked me was that she said that "Русь" and "Иерусалим" must be related because they both contain "РУС". I'm very skeptical when I hear things like this. To double-check, I looked up the origins of любовь in Wiktionary (which takes all of its etymological information from Vasmer's Etymological Dictionary), and I saw that it came from a Proto-Indo-European root, meaning that любовь is etymologically related to English "love", German "Liebe", and even the word "libido".

I try to think about why some Russians believe in these kinds of etymologies. I think it's because all Russians know the word спасибо, and most of them are aware that it comes from an abbreviation (спаси тебя Бог). They also see that many terms in Russian DO indeed come from abbreviations (колхоз, совхоз, универмаг, филфак, etc). But I think they overestimate the prominence of these abbreviations and think they exist in everyday words like любовь. I also think that some Russians (not all) don't want to trust Vasmer's Etymological Dictionary because Vasmer was German.

What do you all think?