I think I’m too American to get this.

So, disclaimer here that I’m not a linguist, I just enjoy learning about linguistics.

OED doesn’t have a Norman ancestor for English wasp - it goes back through Old English (wæfs, wæps, wæsp) to Saxon and Middle German/Dutch all the way back to pre-Germanic.

My guess here was that there’s a common Proto-Indo-European ancestor and Wiktionary, FWIW, agrees - they provide a reconstructed P.I.E word: *wóbʰseh₂ (“wasp”)

ETA: here’s the link to the OED online’s etymology page and a screenshot of it if you don’t have access through your library.

That’s…my point?

It’s called “metathesis”. We did it over hundreds of years with ‘bird’ which was originally ‘brid’ or ‘bridd’, and ‘wasp’ which was originally ‘waps’, apparently.