How It Started … How It’s Going
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Thursday, August 13, 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 soldier who probably never existed lends his name to an entire personality type, and a designer buys a billboard listing himself alongside three men who'd never heard of him.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word describes an entire category of legendary figures — real enough to have a name and a story, unverifiable enough that historians still argue about whether they existed at all. It's a surprisingly crowded category once you start looking for it.
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One more beat.
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The bonus word: CHAUVINIST
Chauvinism takes its name from Nicolas Chauvin, a supposed French soldier said to have served under Napoleon, taken 17 wounds in battle, and remained loudly, embarrassingly devoted to Bonapartism long after the empire collapsed and devotion to it had gone out of fashion. The trouble is that historians are fairly convinced Chauvin never actually existed — he was likely invented or heavily embellished to embody a certain type of Frenchman, then popularized by an 1831 vaudeville play. A word for blind, excessive loyalty to one's own group, quite possibly named after a man who was himself invented to mock that exact trait.
1. CARNIVAL
The most linguistically supported theory traces carnival to medieval Latin *carnem levare* — "to remove meat" — describing the last permitted indulgence before Lent's 40 days of fasting and meat abstinence. The phrase contracted through Old Italian (*carnelevare*, then *carnevale*) into the word we use today. A popular folk explanation claims it means "farewell to flesh" (*carne vale*) instead — a nicer story, but one linguists say has no real evidence behind it.
2. HALOGEN
Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius coined "halogen" in 1826 from Greek *hals* ("salt") and *-gen* ("producer" or "giving birth to"), describing the group of elements — fluorine, chlorine, bromine, iodine, and others — that reliably form salts when they react with metals. He wasn't the first to try: chemist John Schweigger had proposed the same name for chlorine specifically back in 1811, but it didn't catch on until Berzelius applied it to the whole element family.
3. AMNESTY
Amnesty and "amnesia" are etymological siblings, both descending from Greek *amnestia* — "forgetfulness," from *a-* ("not") plus *mnestis* ("remembrance"). Amnesty specifically meant a deliberate, official forgetting: a government choosing to overlook past offenses as if they'd never happened, rather than simply forgiving them. The distinction matters — forgiveness remembers and excuses; amnesty is supposed to erase the record entirely.
4. USHER
An usher) is, by name, a doorkeeper: the word traces through Old French *ussier* back to Latin *ostiarius*, from *ostium* ("door" or "entrance"), itself rooted in *os* ("mouth"). The specific modern sense — someone who walks you to your theater or church seat — only shows up in English by 1868, a fairly recent narrowing of a word that used to mean anyone stationed at any door.
5. VERMILION
Vermilion comes from Late Latin *vermiculus*, "little worm" — specifically the kermes insect, whose dried, crushed bodies produced one of the ancient and medieval world's most prized red dyes. By the time the word reached English in the 14th century, "vermilion" had already shifted to describe a different, mineral-based red (cinnabar) rather than the original insect dye — the word outlived the specific bug it was named for. The same root, fittingly, gives us vermicelli — pasta named for its worm-like shape.
6. IMMUNE
Long before it meant anything medical, immune) was a legal term: Latin *immunis* combined *in-* ("not") with *munis* ("performing service"), describing someone exempt from taxes, public duties, or military service. The word didn't pick up its disease-related sense — protected from infection rather than protected from Roman bureaucracy — until the late 19th century, borrowed back as a medical metaphor for the body being "excused" from a particular illness.
7. NUGGETS
Denver's NBA team started as the Denver Larks in 1967, immediately became the Rockets after an ownership change tied to a local trucking company, then rebranded again in 1974 — this time as the Nuggets, honoring Colorado's 1859 Gold Rush and, not incidentally, avoiding a naming collision with the NBA's existing Houston Rockets as the team prepared to jump leagues. Three names in seven years, and the one that stuck had nothing to do with rockets at all.
8. INTERLAKEN
Interlaken's name is about as literal as geography gets: "between the lakes," sitting on a strip of land between Lake Thun and Lake Brienz. The town wasn't always called that, though — it was originally named Aarmühle, after a mill built on the River Aare sometime before 1365. "Interlaken" started out in 1838 as just the name of the local post office and train station, and didn't become the town's official name until 1891, more than 500 years after the mill that first put the place on the map.
9. SALVO
A salvo — whether it's cannon fire or a burst of applause — traces back to Latin *salve*, "hail," the standard Roman greeting. Italian *salva* extended that into a ceremonial gun-volley fired to greet an important visitor, and English borrowed the word in the late 16th century, eventually widening it to cover any simultaneous discharge of weapons, celebratory or not. A word for firepower that started out as a form of hello.
10. TOMMY HILFIGER
In 1985, with almost every dollar he could raise, a largely unknown Tommy Hilfiger bought a massive Times Square billboard listing "the 4 Great American Designers for Men": Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Perry Ellis — and Hilfiger himself, a man virtually nobody in fashion had heard of, whose only previous venture was a chain of jeans-and-record stores called People's Place that had gone bankrupt in 1977. Hilfiger later said it was the only time in his career he seriously considered quitting before the campaign even launched. It worked anyway — the sheer audacity got the fashion press talking, and the name on that billboard became one of the biggest labels in American menswear.
That's today's set. Come back tomorrow for ten more — and if you're wondering whether a possibly-fictional soldier and a definitely-real billboard stunt belong in the same sentence, they both prove the same point: sometimes the story does more work than the substance.