Is that how you think this place ought to run? Someone posts a delusional, unsourced bit of rubbish from one of the internet's less intelligent corners, someone else comes along and says 'hey, this is delusional and unsourced', then it's up to the challenger to do actual homework? Why not ask Maxwell what the fuck he's talking about? There are a few forums you could look to to see where that will take you. I don't mind all that much - I'm not involved enough here any more to feel more than a residual and nostalgic sense of ownership - but I do think it would be a shame for RI to turn into one of those places.
Whatever, though. It's the weekend, I'm nicely buzzed on cheap red, I'll bite.
You go to court because you play basketball and tennis on a court.
Court means, most basically, a bit of space with walls all around. Like a court of law, but also a courtyard, or (in other Romance languages) a chicken run. It was the obvious word to use for the place where you played tennis, in the days when tennis was an indoor game. From there it went to outdoor tennis courts, and when basketball was invented, what other word would make sense? It's stupid to see some sort of relation between litigation and basketball on etymological grounds.
You play with a racket, why, because that's what it is - it's a racket.
Racket in the sense of scam
comes from racket as in noise, because pickpockets used to make a noise to distract people while they rifled their pockets.
It's probably onomatopoeic, and possibly Gaelic. By contrast
racquet - to give it its proper spelling - is
the same root as a rack for clothes or a shelf. Not the same thing. And it didn't sound the same in English for centuries.
They do not pick words by chance. These words are very serious. They do not use words and terms with no avail.
This is especially annoying. The implication here, although Maxwell the utter fucking tit does not spell it out, is that slang is directed by the ominous
them, that
they have made racquet sound like racket which means scam to
send us a message. Revelation of the method! What balls.
the whole idea in a court is to put the ball in the other guys court
No it isn't. The expression this bloody fool is thinking about refers to a situation where it's not up to you but up to someone else to do something. In an actual tennis game the idea is to deliver an unplayable ball, in basketball you want to keep possession from the opposing team, and in a court of law you want to present an unbeatable argument. When the 'ball is in someone else's court', that is a less than optimal situation, where you have nothing to do but wait.
the judge is wearing a black robe, so he is the referee...
Huh? What connection, on planet Earth, is there between refereeing and the colour black?
The judge rules from the bench. "Bench" in Latin is a bank, therefore, the judge rules for the bank. Where do you find banks? You find banks on both sides of a river and what does a river bank do?
Bench and bank are actually the same word, so he got this one right. It was probably by accident though. Bench doesn't come from bank; bank comes from bench, because usurers in the old days used to do business from wooden benches in marketplaces. And
bank as in a river bank is a completely different word - it's Germanic, not Latin, and is the root in cloudbank, mudbank, sandbank and so on. Unrelated.
Any of these links are easily found by googling one of the words and 'etymology' after it. If you're interested I recommend the
Inky Fool, Mark Forsyth, whose Etymologicon is an especially great book.