They were thinking that they were making a new medium to propagate a signal. Wifi is not a medium but a protocol.
That's Aether.
Synonyms
So it is, I didn't know that. In that case the other poster point stands, I'm guessing they used the word to indicate the magic of the network?
...So calling wifi Aethernet would be hilarious, but I think we can maybe agree that would not have been a great idea for the sake of actually being able to talk about them out loud.
Tell that to the person who said "trie" should be pronounced "tree"!
The name actually makes some sense from the low level system programmer's perspective on the original Ethernet where you flung packets blindly into a single coax cable that snaked around to each workstation.