How It Started … How It’s Going
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Wednesday, September 2, 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, close this tab, go solve today's puzzle, and come back afterward. We'll wait.
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Somewhere below, a 1972 break-in at one Washington office building is still, more than fifty years later, quietly renaming every scandal that comes after it.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's quiet echo is a word outliving the specific thing it first described — a lighting technique nobody uses anymore, a mishearing nobody ever corrected, an acronym that swallowed the phrase it was shorthand for.
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One more beat. Deep breath. Here we go.
The bonus word: NEW ORLEANS
French colonists founded "New Orleans" in 1718 and named it in tribute to Philippe II, the regent then ruling France on behalf of the young Louis XV. The French name wasn't an accident of sentiment so much as a marketing decision — colonial officials worried a name borrowed from a local Native American place would scare off the French settlers they were trying to recruit.
1. NAPOLEON
The delicate, many-layered French pastry known in English as a "Napoleon" is called *mille-feuille* ("thousand leaves") in its home country, where it has nothing to do with the emperor at all. Food historians trace the English name to *Napolitain* — French for "a cake from Naples" — which sounds close enough to "Napoléon" that generations of English-language menus simply kept the wrong word.
2. EMMY
Television's top award started life as "Immy," an affectionate nickname for the image orthicon camera tube that made modern broadcast television possible. When the fledgling Television Academy needed a name for its new statuette in the late 1940s, engineers feminized the spelling — partly because the trophy had already been sculpted as a woman holding an atom — and "Emmy" was born.
3. WATERGATE
Long before the break-in, the Watergate complex was already named — for what once stood on the site: the eastern terminus of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, where a large wooden water gate and an adjoining lock regulated boat traffic flowing into the Potomac River. By the mid-20th century it was also one of Washington's most glamorous addresses, home to enough prominent, politically connected residents that it earned the nickname "the Republican Bastille." Then came the 1972 break-in and cover-up that ended a presidency, and the scandal was so thoroughly seared into the culture that commentators have spent the five decades since bolting the same four letters onto practically every controversy that follows, from politics to sports to office email leaks — a naming convention linguists now just call the "-gate" suffix.
4. OPOSSUM
North America's only marsupial owes its English name to a Powhatan word, recorded by English colonist John Smith around 1612 during his time in the Chesapeake Bay region. It translates roughly to "white animal" — a fairly literal description of the "opossum," which later got clipped down to the more familiar "possum."
5. RAGTIME
The syncopated piano style that swept America in the 1890s and 1900s, popularized by composers like Scott Joplin, took its name from a shortening of "ragged time" — a description of how its melodies deliberately broke up an otherwise steady, conventional rhythm. "Ragtime" would go on to lay much of the groundwork for jazz.
6. LIMELIGHT
Nineteenth-century theaters achieved their brightest, whitest stage lighting by burning a chunk of heated calcium oxide — quicklime — in a flame hot enough to make it glow intensely. First used to illuminate a London stage in 1837, the technique gave the most desirable, brightly lit spot on stage its name, and even though electric bulbs replaced it more than a century ago, being "in the limelight" still means being the center of attention.
7. EPIDEMIC
The word "epidemic" comes from Greek roots meaning roughly "upon the people" — *epi* plus *demos* — but it didn't start out as a medical term at all. Homer used *epidemios* simply to describe someone back home in their own country, and later writers applied it just as loosely, to rain or to war. It was Hippocrates who first repurposed the word, centuries later, to describe disease spreading rapidly through a population — physicians kept using it in that sense for centuries more before anyone had the faintest idea that germs, rather than bad air or divine punishment, were actually responsible.
8. AIRSTREAM
Wally Byam unveiled the sleek, riveted, all-aluminum travel trailer that made his company famous in 1936. He named the brand for the way its rounded shape was said to glide down the highway like a current of air, cutting wind resistance instead of fighting it — and "Airstream" trailers have kept that same silver, unmistakably aerodynamic shape for nearly ninety years since.
9. NOVOCAINE
German chemist Alfred Einhorn patented this local anesthetic in 1905 and gave it a trademarked name built from Latin *novus*, "new," plus a suffix borrowed from an entirely different, illicit numbing drug already familiar to chemists of the era. "Novocaine" went on to become dentistry's go-to name for numbing shots in general, whether or not the actual drug in the syringe is the one Einhorn invented.
10. SCOOBYDOO
In 1968, CBS daytime programming executive Fred Silverman was on a flight to a development meeting for a new Saturday-morning cartoon, then in a very different, more serious live-action-style format. Listening to Frank Sinatra's "Strangers in the Night" on the way, he misheard the scat vocals at the song's end — "doo-be-doo-be-doo" — as "scooby-dooby-doo." He liked it enough to rename the show's cowardly Great Dane, and the whole series, "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!" — reshaping the format around the dog as the star along the way.
That's today's set. Come back tomorrow for ten more — and today's quiet through-line is words that outgrew the specific thing they first described: a lighting technique nobody uses anymore, a break-in that renamed every scandal since, an acronym that swallowed the phrase it stood for. The original technology fades; the name it left behind just keeps going.