Apparently, the sport came into existence in the 1920's and in 1926 a hunting & fishing magazine ran a competition to come up with a name for this new activity. The winning submission was "skeet" which by all accounts is derived from the Norwegian word for "shoot," which is "skyte". So basically saying "skeet shooting" is saying "shoot shooting." Oh- also, the clay disks are called pigeons because at one time real pigeons were used as targets, but this became illegal in the 1920's. So now you know.