Essay seed — from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa Volume 1 ingest. Not drafted; this is the argument and the spine.
Why is the first king called Pṛthu? Because pṛthu means extensive, and he made the earth extensive.
Why is a king called rājan? Because rañjayati — he delights his people.
Why are the Niṣādas dark, short-limbed and consigned to the mountains and the forests? Because when they came out of the dead king's thigh, someone said niṣīda — sit down.
Read those three again. In each one, a word's sound has just been offered as the reason a thing is the way it is. And in the third, the thing being explained is the permanent social position of a named people.
1. It is systematic, not decorative. Nine of them in one volume, and they are load-bearing. Pṛthu from pṛthu. Rājan from rañjayati. Niṣāda from niṣīda. Vijitāśva from vijita + aśva. Vena from ven, to harass. Dakṣa from dakṣa, skilled. Rudra from rud, to weep. Nārāyaṇa from nāra + ayana. Parīkṣit from parīkṣā, a test — and that one is given two incompatible etymologies, both kept, both used. Source: Named by Pun.
2. In several cases the pun is the only justification offered. This is where it stops being a curiosity. Rudra is born from rage that the creator tried and failed to control, and the reason he is Rudra is that he wept. That is the whole derivation of the character. No argument about the nature of destruction, no theology — a child cried, so here is his name, and the name then determines what he is for.
3. And once, the pun does a people. The Niṣāda passage is the one to slow down on, and the essay should not flinch from it. Vena's corpse is churned; a figure emerges from the thigh; he is described by complexion and build; he is told to sit down; and his descendants get the mountains and the forests. The word made the category. [CONTESTED] — source: The Thigh That Carried the Sins, which states what the text says and what it is doing and resolves nothing. The essay must do the same. This is not a section where a writer gets to be clever.
4. The mechanism, which is contemporary and everywhere. A folk etymology is a claim about the world disguised as a claim about a word — and it is uniquely hard to argue with, because arguing requires disputing the sound, which is right there and undeniable. Nobody can say Niṣāda does not sound like niṣīda. The resemblance is real; the inference is doing all the work; and the two are impossible to separate at speed.
An explanation that arrives as a pun bypasses the part of the reader that checks explanations — because the evidence it offers (the resemblance) is genuinely there, and the conclusion it draws from that evidence is never stated as a conclusion. This is not an ancient error. It is the reason a good coinage can end an argument, and the reason naming a thing well is frequently the same act as winning.