Not sure if this topic belongs here, but....
For Christmas every year my daughter gets me a desk calendar. For many years it was The Far Side. Then she started changing the theme every year; one year golf, last year was Italian words and phrases. This year is Everything Mafia. Its a tear off calendar and every day has a new word, phrase, historical antecdote, or biography. Recently the origin of the word "Mafia" came up. I think I always took it for granted or never gave it much thought, but here is what the calendar said.

"One of the theories about how the word Mafia entered the language is that it started as an acronym for the rallying cry of the Sicilian resistance forces. Morte alla Francia Italia anelia! is translated as "Death to the French is Italy's cry." There is another opinion that Mafia is a corruption of an Arabic word meaning "refuge". In Sicily's violent history, people regularly ran for the hills to seek refuge from the invader."