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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, the woman who invented a holiday got arrested trying to stop it, a pandemic was named after the one country honest enough to report on it, and the word for a boring procedure comes from a medieval party game.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is a name that was assembled from parts, one piece from Kentucky and one from California, and then had a word amputated.
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BonusMASTERCARD
In 1966, a group of banks that had been shut out of Bank of America's BankAmericard program formed the Interbank Card Association to fight back. The name on the plastic came together in 1969: "Master Charge" was borrowed from a card run by the First National Bank of Louisville, and the red-and-yellow interlocking circles came from the Western States Bankcard Association in California, which had been using them on its own cards. The full name was "Master Charge: The Interbank Card," which nobody said out loud, and in 1979 the company simplified it to "Mastercard." The circles have outlasted every other part of the design.
1MOTHERSDAY
Anna Jarvis held the first "Mother's Day" observance in May 1908 at a Methodist church in Grafton, West Virginia, in memory of her own mother, and campaigned until Woodrow Wilson made the second Sunday in May a national holiday in 1914. Then she watched the florists and card companies move in. Jarvis spent the rest of her life and most of an inheritance suing anyone who used the name commercially, was arrested for disturbing the peace in 1925 after crashing a convention of the American War Mothers over their carnation sales, and by the end was lobbying to have the holiday she created struck from the calendar. She died in a Philadelphia sanitarium in 1948, broke.
2ADAMSAPPLE
The folk explanation is that a piece of the forbidden fruit stuck in Adam's throat and the bump was passed down to every man since. The real history is duller and stranger. In the Middle Ages, "Adam's apple" was a generic name for several fruits, especially the pomegranate, and medieval Arab physicians called the bump in the throat a "pomegranate" for its shape. European scholars translating them rendered it in Latin as "pomum Adami," and English had "Adam's apple" for the larynx by the 1620s. A popular 19th-century theory that the whole thing was a mistranslation of a Hebrew phrase for "bump of the man" sounds convincing and has one problem: no such Hebrew phrase has ever been found.
3SPANISHFLU
Spain was neutral in the First World War, so when the 1918 influenza arrived there in May, its newspapers reported it in full, including the news that King Alfonso XIII had come down with it. France, Britain, Germany, and the United States were all censoring flu coverage to protect wartime morale, which meant the only detailed accounts anyone could read came from Madrid. Readers drew the obvious wrong conclusion. Spain, for its part, called it the "French flu." The "Spanish flu" most likely started somewhere else entirely; the first well-documented cases were at an army camp in Kansas in March 1918.
4TIMETRAVEL
H.G. Wells's 1895 novel The Time Machine gave the world the idea and most of the vocabulary, but Wells wrote about "time travelling" and the "Time Traveller," never the bare noun. "Time travel" itself is not recorded until 1914, and nobody is on record "time travelling" as a verb until 1937. The concept, in other words, arrived a couple of decades before the phrase settled down.
5EURYTHMICS
Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, a Swiss composer, developed a method of teaching music through physical movement in the early 1900s, and it spread through schools across Europe under the name "eurhythmics." Annie Lennox took classes in it as a child in Aberdeen. When she and Dave Stewart left The Tourists in 1980 and needed a name for their new duo, she reached back for it, dropping the "h," and "Eurythmics" became one of the few bands named after a pedagogical technique. Lennox is now a patron of Dalcroze UK.
6RIGMAROLE
In 1291, and again in 1296, Edward I of England made the nobles of Scotland sign parchments swearing allegiance to him. The documents, with dozens of seals dangling from ribbons, came to be called the "Ragman Rolls," after a medieval parlor game called "ragman" in which players pulled strings attached to a scroll to reveal a verse about themselves. "Ragman roll" drifted into meaning any long, rambling document, went quiet for a few centuries, and resurfaced in the 1700s in spellings like "riggmon-rowle" before settling as "rigmarole," a word for a procedure that goes on far too long.
7CHROMOSOME
In 1888, the German anatomist Wilhelm Waldeyer needed a name for the thread-like structures that appeared inside dividing cells when he stained them, and he called them "chromosomes," from Greek words meaning "colored body." The name records nothing about what they do, only that they soaked up aniline dye better than anything around them. It would be another 14 years before anyone connected them to heredity.
8ABRACADABRA
The earliest surviving record of "abracadabra" is in the Liber Medicinalis of Serenus Sammonicus, physician to the Roman emperor Caracalla in the early third century. His prescription for a persistent fever, probably malaria, was to write the word on an amulet in a triangle, dropping one letter per line until a single A remained, and wear it around the neck; the shrinking word was supposed to funnel the sickness out of the body. Where the word itself came from, whether Aramaic, Hebrew, or Greek, is still argued about.
9ROTTWEILER
Roman legions crossing the Alps brought drover dogs to herd the cattle that fed the army, and some of those dogs stayed behind around the town of Rottweil in what is now southwestern Germany. The butchers of Rottweil bred their descendants to drive cattle to market and haul carts of meat, and the breed was known as the "Rottweiler Metzgerhund," the Rottweil butchers' dog, long before the first breed club formed in 1914. The "Rottweiler" is, in short, named for a town, and the town for a Roman settlement.
10DINOSAUR
Richard Owen, the anatomist who would go on to found the Natural History Museum, proposed the name "Dinosauria" in 1842 for three fossil reptiles that seemed to belong together: Megalosaurus, Iguanodon, and Hylaeosaurus. Every schoolbook translates it as "terrible lizard," but Owen's own gloss was "fearfully great," a phrase of awe rather than fright, meant to capture creatures "far surpassing in size the largest existing reptiles." "Dinosaur" was a compliment.
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 got away from their makers: a holiday its founder tried to kill, a word Owen meant kindly, and a pandemic pinned on the one country that told the truth.