How It Started … How It’s Going
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Thursday, August 6, 2026 · The Origins Desk
🚨 MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING 🚨
Today's Origins Quiz answers — all ten of them, plus the bonus word — are below. If you haven't played yet, go solve today's puzzle first. This post will still be here when you get back.
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Somewhere below, a Texas congressman blames a turkey for the way his colleagues talk, and a word for "not equal" quietly turns into the person standing between two rivals.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is also a city with a spelling dispute so persistent it got its own Wikipedia article. From 1891 to 1911, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names actually mandated the "h"-less "Pittsburg" as the standard American spelling — locals fought back for two decades until the board relented in 1911. Twenty years of arguing about one letter.
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One more beat.
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The bonus word: PITTSBURGH
Pittsburgh takes its name from a 1758 letter General John Forbes sent to William Pitt the Elder, notifying him that the newly captured Fort Duquesne site would be renamed in his honor. Forbes was Scottish, and "burgh" — the Scots spelling of "borough," still seen today in Edinburgh — was the form he naturally reached for, pronounced roughly "Pitts-burro." That one Scotsman's spelling habit is why Pittsburgh, alone among America's several Pittsburgs, keeps its "h" to this day.
1. PANIC
Panic) comes from Pan, the Greek god of the wild and shepherds, whose sudden, unearthly cries were said to startle flocks and lone travelers into blind terror — especially in the empty quiet of the countryside, exactly where he liked to lurk. The Greeks had a word for that specific flavor of dread, *panikon*, "of Pan," and it's stuck around for roughly 2,500 years since.
2. ICONOCLAST
An iconoclast originally meant something much more literal than "someone who challenges convention": from Greek *eikon* ("image") + *klastes* ("breaker"), it described participants in actual campaigns of religious image-smashing, most famously the Byzantine Iconoclasm of the 8th and 9th centuries, when emperors ordered icons of saints destroyed as idolatrous. The word didn't pick up its modern, metaphorical sense — someone who attacks cherished beliefs rather than physical statues — until centuries later.
3. TUMI
Founder Charlie Clifford named his 1975 luggage company after a figure from Peruvian Pre-Columbian iconography, encountered during his two years in Peru as part of an experimental Peace Corps MBA program. Tumi is more precisely the name of a ceremonial Andean sacrificial knife strongly associated with a regional god-figure — a striking symbol for a company that started as a $10,000 leather-bag import operation and grew into one of the most recognizable names in premium travel gear.
4. TUXEDO
The tuxedo traces to the Tuxedo Club, founded in 1886 by tobacco heir Pierre Lorillard IV in Tuxedo Park, New York. Members had copied a shorter, more casual dinner jacket they'd seen in England and started wearing it to informal dinners at the club. As the story goes, when a few of them wore the new jackets to a dinner at Delmonico's in Manhattan, curious fellow diners were told simply, "that's what they wear for dinner up at Tuxedo" — and the name outlived the club that popularized it.
5. SOPHOMORE
Here's a case where the "clever" explanation isn't quite the true one, and the question above is careful about it: sophomore actually derives from "sophist" (Greek *sophistes*, "wise person"), not from a genuine Greek compound. But by the 1700s, the spelling had drifted toward "sophomore," almost certainly nudged along by folk etymology — the appealing (and not entirely inaccurate) idea that it secretly combines *sophos* ("wise") with *moros* ("foolish, dull"), a fitting description of second-year students newly confident in opinions they haven't fully earned yet.
6. BANOFFEE PIE
Banoffee pie — banana + toffee — was invented in 1971 at the Hungry Monk restaurant in Jevington, England, by owner Nigel Mackenzie and chef Ian Dowding, who coined the portmanteau name themselves. It wasn't entirely original: the pair had been trying to recreate an American dessert called Blum's Coffee Toffee Pie, and simply swapped in bananas because they paired better with the toffee and cream than the original's apples and mandarins. A riff on someone else's recipe went on to become a genuinely British classic.
7. UMPIRE
An umpire is, etymologically, someone who is "not equal" to either side of a dispute — which is exactly the point. The word comes from Old French *nonper* ("not equal," from *non* + *per*), which entered Middle English as "noumpere." Over time, "a noumpere" got misheard and re-split as "an oumpere" — a linguistic slip called metanalysis, the same process that turned "a napron" into "an apron" — eventually settling into "umpire." A word for impartiality, born from a mishearing.
8. ROKU
Roku is Japanese for "six" — because it was founder Anthony Wood's sixth company. As Wood tells it, he was at a Japanese restaurant in Palo Alto trying to name his new streaming venture, and asked the waitress for the Japanese word for "five" first (his fourth company had used a similar naming convention that didn't pan out). Once "six" came back as "roku," he liked the sound of it enough to make it official — a company name picked over dinner, between courses.
9. GOBBLEDYGOOK
Gobbledygook was coined in 1944 by Maury Maverick, a Texas congressman and later mayor of San Antonio, who used it in a memo blasting the dense, jargon-choked language of his fellow bureaucrats. He said the word came to him thinking of an old turkey gobbler, "always gobbledy gobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity," eventually turning around and getting "bogged down in his own gook." Fittingly, Maverick's own grandfather, Samuel Maverick, is the reason unbranded cattle — and eventually independent-minded people — are called "mavericks."
10. HYSTERIA
Hysteria comes from the Greek *hystera*, "womb." For over two thousand years, going back at least to Hippocrates, physicians attributed a whole range of symptoms in women — fainting, anxiety, breathlessness — to a "wandering womb," believed to drift through the body seeking moisture and wreaking havoc wherever it settled, a theory that shaped Western medicine's treatment of women's health well into the 19th and even 20th century. The diagnosis itself was finally dropped from psychiatry's official manual only in 1980.
That's today's set. Come back tomorrow for ten more — and if the umpire/apron word-splitting trick got you, that's the same reason "an ewt" became "a newt," just in reverse.