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Saturday, September 5, 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 do that first. This post isn't going anywhere.
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Somewhere below, a word for deliberate misdirection turns out to have a slightly misleading origin story of its own.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's quiet through-line is disguise and misdirection, in language and otherwise, a phrase invented to describe a trick, a term for someone who isn't who they appear to be, a word for a double who shouldn't exist. Even the food on this list has a fake origin story.
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One more beat. Deep breath. Here we go.
The bonus word: RED HERRING
The standard explanation for "red herring" is that hunters once dragged a smoked, strong-smelling herring across a trail to throw hounds off a scent, and the phrase got borrowed for any deliberate distraction. Except that hunting practice doesn't actually seem to have existed. The whole idea traces to a single 1807 essay by journalist William Cobbett, who told the story as a political metaphor about a misled press chasing false rumors of Napoleon's defeat, not as a report of something huntsmen genuinely did. Every dictionary definition since has essentially been repeating Cobbett's own decoy.
1. ROQUEFORT
"Roquefort" takes its name from Roquefort-sur-Soulzon, a village whose own name means "strong rock" in Occitan, fortified by shepherds after the barbarian invasions of the 4th century. The cheese has been aged in the village's limestone caves ever since, protected by a royal decree as far back as 1411.
2. ENCORE
"Encore" is simply the French word for "again" or "still." English audiences adopted it wholesale as the shout demanding one more song, with no translation and no changes, which makes it one of the more honest loanwords on this list.
3. DOPPELGANGER
German novelist Jean Paul coined "Doppelgänger," literally "double-goer," in his 1796 novel *Siebenkäs*. The word was unfamiliar enough at the time that he added a footnote explaining what he meant by it. English picked up the loanword within a few decades, usually dropping the umlaut along the way.
4. HOTDOG
The popular story behind "hot dog" doesn't hold up: it credits a cartoonist who supposedly couldn't spell "dachshund" at a 1901 baseball game and drew a dog in a bun instead. No copy of that cartoon has ever surfaced, and the cartoonist didn't even move to New York until 1903. The earliest confirmed print use actually turned up six years earlier, in an 1895 Yale Record poem about a campus lunch cart nicknamed "the Kennel Club."
5. ETYMOLOGY
"Etymology" gets its own name from Greek *etymos* ("true") plus *-logia* ("the study of"), reflecting an old Greek belief that a word's original, literal sense was somehow its truest one. Modern etymologists mostly don't buy that theory anymore, but they kept the name anyway.
6. REVEILLE
"Reveille," the bugle call that wakes a military camp, comes from the French command *réveillez*, "wake up," itself built from a Latin root meaning to keep watch. The tune has called American troops to muster since at least 1812.
7. RENDEZVOUS
"Rendezvous" is a French imperative, literally "present yourselves." It entered English in the 1590s as a term for a designated troop-assembly point, decades before it softened into the far less martial sense of a planned meeting, romantic or otherwise.
8. INCOGNITO
"Incognito" is Italian for "unknown," borrowed directly into English for anyone traveling or acting under a disguised identity. It has needed no updating since.
9. NINJA
A "ninja" was originally a covert agent trained in espionage, sabotage, and assassination during Japan's feudal era. In just the last few decades, English has stretched the word into casual slang for anyone unusually skilled at a task, coding very much included.
10. GUERRILLA
"Guerrilla" is a Spanish diminutive of *guerra*, "war," literally meaning "little war." It entered English during the Peninsular War of 1808 to 1814, describing the irregular resistance that Spanish civilians waged against Napoleon's occupying army, tying down French troops who never quite figured out who they were fighting.
That's today's set. Come back tomorrow for ten more, and today's quiet through-line is disguise and misdirection: a phrase for a deliberate decoy that turns out to be a decoy about its own origin, a word for a double who shouldn't exist, a term for fighters who blended back into the population they came from. Even the ballpark snack on this list has a fake backstory. Nothing here is quite what it first claims to be.