"Ignoble" means that something is not noble, so they're just parodying the name of the Nobel prize with a play-on-words (edited for clarification.)

ignoble /ɪɡˈnəʊbl/ adjective

1. not honourable in character or purpose.

2. of humble origin or social status.

It’s a play on words, the Ig Nobel prize is the ignoble cousin of the Nobel prize.

When I see Ig it reminds me of grade we had in school LG, "lite godt" (that would translate to a grade D I think). Ig looks like LG written in small caps.

From Latin, meaning the lack of something.

Made me dream up the (it turns out) false etymology of "ignite" deriving from ig-, lack of, and nite, nonstandard spelling variant of night, combining to mean "remove darkness."

(for readers wondering where then does ignite come from? it comes from ignire, latin which roughly translates to to set on fire, ignis being the latin for fire. the verb has a derivation similar to how we google, googled)

Well the Romans loved their false etymologies, so it seems fitting.

Can you explain? I didn't even know Romans thought about etymologies.

They put quite a lot of though into it, and so did the Greeks. They thought that the origins of words could shed light (sometime divine light) on meaning, and they used etymology to tell stories and offer moral guidance.

The problem is that many classical (and later) scholars, historians and poets were prone to uncritically repeating stories without doing any fact checking, or just making stuff up to fit the narrative. The same is true for their etymologies.

Socrates and Plutarch in particular have reputations for their imaginative etymologies.