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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 will keep.
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Somewhere below, a science-fiction novelist named a weapon thirty years before it existed, an Olympic sport refuses to answer to the name everyone calls it, and a hotel chain owes its name to an architect's joke.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is a rule everyone quotes and almost nobody quotes correctly, including, possibly, the man it's named for.
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BonusMURPHY'S LAW
In 1949, at what was then Muroc Army Air Field in California, Colonel John Paul Stapp was strapping himself into a rocket sled to find out how much deceleration a human body could take. Captain Edward A. Murphy Jr., an engineer visiting from Wright Field, had brought along a set of strain gauges to measure the forces on Stapp's harness. After a run, they read zero: an assistant had wired every one of them backwards. What Murphy said next is disputed. A colleague remembered "If that guy has any way of making a mistake, he will"; Murphy's son insisted it was a drier point about designing systems so the disastrous option can't be chosen. Either way, Stapp repeated it at a press conference a few weeks later, explaining that his team had avoided serious injury by assuming anything that could go wrong would, and "Murphy's law" left the base and never came back.
The full story: Where does the phrase "Murphy's law" come from? →1MOSCOWMULE
The "Moscow mule" was born of two inventory problems. In the early 1940s, John Martin of the Heublein company had bought the Smirnoff brand and couldn't get Americans to drink vodka, while Jack Morgan, owner of the Cock 'n' Bull on Sunset Strip, had a house ginger beer nobody wanted. Mixed together with lime and served in a copper mug, the two unsellable products became a Hollywood sensation. Who supplied the mugs is still argued about: Martin credited a woman who'd inherited a copper factory, while a rival family story credits a Russian immigrant named Sophie Berezinski who had 2,000 of them to unload.
2UPPERCASE
In the days of hand-set metal type, a compositor worked from two shallow wooden trays: the small letters, used constantly, sat in the lower tray within easy reach, and the capitals, used far less often, sat in the tray mounted above and behind it. "Uppercase" and "lowercase" started as descriptions of furniture, and they outlived the furniture by more than a century.
3RAINCHECK
On June 21, 1883, the St. Louis Brown Stockings announced that fans who paid for a game called off by rain before five innings would get a ticket good for a future game. The "rain check" spread through baseball within a few seasons, and by 1887 a shoe-shiner was reportedly offering one to a customer whose polish got ruined in a downpour, the first sign the phrase was leaving the ballpark.
4PINGPONG
The English games firm J. Jaques & Son trademarked "Ping-Pong" in 1901, naming their boxed parlor set for the sound of a celluloid ball on a vellum bat, and later sold the American rights to Parker Brothers. Because the name belonged to a company, everyone else had to call the game something generic. That's why the governing body founded in 1926 is the International Table Tennis Federation, and why the Olympic sport is officially table tennis, no matter what your basement calls it.
5HOLIDAYINN
Kemmons Wilson came home from a miserable 1951 family road trip to Washington, D.C., convinced America needed clean, predictable motels where kids stayed free. As his architect, Eddie Bluestein, drew up plans for the first one on Summer Avenue in Memphis, he jokingly wrote the title of the 1942 Bing Crosby musical he'd watched the night before across the drawings. Wilson liked it, and "Holiday Inn" opened in August 1952 under a name borrowed from a movie about a Connecticut farmhouse open only on holidays.
6YELLOWSTONE
The Hidatsa called the river "Mi tsi a-da-zi," roughly "yellow rock river," most likely for the sandstone bluffs along its lower reaches rather than the canyon walls in the park. French trappers translated it as "Roche Jaune," and Lewis and Clark wrote down the English version, "Yellow Stone," after meeting Hidatsa speakers in 1805. The name had been on maps for nearly seventy years by the time Congress made "Yellowstone" the world's first national park in 1872.
7SURREALISM
The poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined "surrealism" in 1917, using it in a program note for Parade, the Jean Cocteau ballet with sets by Picasso and music by Satie, and again in the subtitle of his own play Les Mamelles de Tiresias. Apollinaire died the following year, and it was Andre Breton who picked the word up in 1924 for the manifesto that turned it into a movement, defining it as thought dictated "in the absence of any control exercised by reason."
8LIEUTENANT
"Lieutenant" is Old French for "place-holding": someone who holds a superior's place when the superior is absent. That's why a lieutenant governor stands in for a governor, and why the military rank sits just below a captain. Nobody has ever fully explained why the British pronounce it "leftenant," which is its own unsolved origin story.
9ATOMICBOMB
H.G. Wells's 1914 novel The World Set Free imagined a war fought with "atomic bombs" that kept exploding for days, and it is the earliest known use of the phrase. Physicist Leo Szilard read the book in 1932, and after conceiving the nuclear chain reaction in 1933 he assigned his patent to the British Admiralty to keep it secret, later writing that he knew what it would mean "because I had read H.G. Wells."
10WRISTWATCH
Men carried pocket watches and women wore watches on bracelets, and that was the rule until the Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos-Dumont told his friend Louis Cartier that fishing a watch out of his pocket mid-flight was impossible. Cartier's 1904 answer, a flat square watch on a leather strap, is generally credited as the first "wristwatch" designed for a man, and Santos-Dumont wore it during his 1906 flight in Paris, the first in Europe to be officially witnessed.
That's today's set, and the first of a new three-day run. Come back tomorrow for ten more, and if there's a thread running under this batch, it's names that arrived before the thing they describe was ready: a bomb named in a novel, a national park named on a fur trapper's map, and a hotel chain named after a movie about a building that didn't exist.