How It Started … How It’s Going
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Monday, August 10, 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 besieged duke's chef supposedly invents a sauce with a fifty-year paper trail gap, and a word for industrial protest turns out to have nothing to do with the shoe-throwing story everyone tells about it.
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Fun fact to fill the space: a surprising share of "here's exactly how this was invented" food and word stories are tidy legends assembled well after the fact, not contemporary records. Historians can usually tell, because the good version of the story always shows up decades later than the thing it claims to explain. Today's set has at least two textbook examples.
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One more beat.
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The bonus word: MAYONNAISE
The most popular story behind mayonnaise holds that in 1756, the Duke de Richelieu's chef, besieging Port Mahon on the Spanish island of Menorca during the opening battle of the Seven Years' War, needed a victory feast sauce but had no cream on hand. He improvised with egg and oil instead, and the result was named "salsa mahonesa" — sauce of Mahón — which French tongues eventually smoothed into mayonnaise. It's a great story, but food historians note a real problem with it: the sauce doesn't actually show up in print until roughly fifty years later, and the French army's version looks suspiciously similar to a Spanish garlic-oil sauce called alioli, with the garlic simply left out for Parisian taste. A satisfying origin story with an inconvenient paper trail.
1. MELBOURNE
Before it was Melbourne, Australia's second-largest city was briefly, unofficially "Batmania," after John Batman, one of the settlers who claimed to have founded it in 1835. Governor Richard Bourke rejected that name (along with contenders like Bearbrass and Bareheep) and formally named the settlement Melbourne in 1837, honoring Britain's sitting prime minister, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne — whose own title came from Melbourne Hall in Derbyshire, a market town he'd never have guessed would end up eclipsing his own name recognition.
2. AMAZON
In 1541, Spanish officer Francisco de Orellana was sent downriver on a supply run and, thanks to brutal currents and repeated ambushes, simply never made it back — instead he and his crew rode the river all the way to the Atlantic, becoming the first Europeans to traverse it. According to the expedition's chronicler, Friar Gaspar de Carvajal, they clashed along the way with fierce warriors that reminded them of the Amazons of Greek legend, and the name stuck to the river itself. Modern historians are skeptical the encounter played out exactly as reported — chroniclers had every incentive to make the voyage sound as dramatic as possible — but the Amazon's name has outlasted the doubts about how it was earned.
3. YIFTER
At the 1980 Moscow Olympics, Ethiopian runner Miruts Yifter — competing at around age 40, with an Olympic career already marked by missed chances — won gold in both the 10,000m and 5,000m, becoming the first Ethiopian to take two golds at a single Games. His nickname, "Yifter the Shifter," came from his signature late-race gear change: he'd hang back through most of a race, then explode with a sudden pace shift in the final few hundred meters that rivals simply couldn't answer, most famously blowing past the field with 300 meters left in both finals.
4. ORIGAMI
The word origami combines Japanese *oru* ("to fold") and *kami* ("paper") — but it's a surprisingly recent label for an old practice. Paper folding in Japan was originally called *orikata*, "folded shapes," and the word didn't shift to "origami" until around 1880. The technique itself is even older and not originally Japanese at all: paper folding likely began in China not long after paper's invention, then traveled to Japan by way of Korea and Buddhist monks around the 7th century.
5. NEANDERTHAL
Fossils found in Germany's Neander Valley in 1856 gave their name to Neanderthal, but the valley's own name has a layered history worth a beat of its own: it honors 17th-century pastor and hymn-writer Joachim Neumann, whose family had Grecized their surname from "Neumann" ("new man") to "Neander" generations earlier, following a fashion of the era. So the world's most famous extinct human relative is indirectly named after a hymn-writer's grandfather's taste in Greek wordplay.
6. NOSTALGIA
Nostalgia was coined in 1688 by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer, combining Greek *nostos* ("homecoming," the same root behind Odysseus's whole journey home in the *Odyssey*) with *algos* ("pain"). Hofer wasn't being poetic — he was describing a genuine, sometimes fatal medical condition he'd observed in Swiss mercenaries stationed far from home: severe homesickness treated as a real illness, with real physical symptoms. It took centuries for the word to soften from "diagnosable disease" into "wistful feeling about the good old days."
7. ALGORITHM
Algorithm traces to the Latinized name of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a 9th-century Persian scholar working in Baghdad's House of Wisdom. His book on solving equations, whose title contributed the word "algebra," was translated into Latin in the 12th century as "algorismus," originally referring specifically to the Hindu-Arabic numeral system and step-by-step calculation methods he helped popularize in Europe. The word drifted from "a specific guy's calculation method" to "any step-by-step procedure" over the centuries that followed — a fittingly algorithmic transformation.
8. ISOTOPE
In 1913, chemist Frederick Soddy needed a word for something new: forms of the same element with different atomic weights that nonetheless belonged in the exact same slot on the periodic table. The name came from a friend, Scottish writer and physician Margaret Todd, who suggested Greek *isos* ("equal") + *topos* ("place") — isotope, "same place." A word contributed, appropriately, by someone who wasn't the chemist on the project.
9. SABOTAGE
The popular story says striking French workers threw their wooden *sabots* into machinery to jam the gears — a satisfying mental image, and almost certainly not what actually happened. Linguists trace sabotage instead to *saboter*, a French verb originally describing the loud, clumsy clatter of walking in wooden shoes, which became a byword for sloppy, deliberately bad work. Anarchist Émile Pouget popularized the modern sense in the 1890s to describe workers protesting not by striking, but by working badly on purpose — inefficiency as resistance, no actual footwear required.
10. EL DORADO
Long before it meant a golden city, El Dorado — Spanish for "the gilded one" — referred to a person: a king of the Muisca people in the Colombian Andes, who was ritually coated in gold dust before boarding a raft on Lake Guatavita to make offerings to the gods. Spanish conquistadors who heard the story chased the legend for generations, and somewhere along the way, the gilded man's title migrated onto an entire imagined city of gold that no expedition ever actually found — because it never described a place to begin with.
That's today's set. Come back tomorrow for ten more — and if the sabotage shoe-throwing story let you down, we're sorry, but at least now you know something most people confidently get wrong at trivia night.