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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 world's most famous desert is named "Desert," a fruit lost a letter to grammar, and the word on every report card started life as a shipping insurance term.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is named after a city, which is named after a king, and the people who made it famous had mostly never been to the city.
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BonusCHARLESTON
The dance exploded out of Runnin' Wild, an all-Black Broadway revue that opened in October 1923, with a James P. Johnson tune whose off-beat rhythm he said he'd picked up from South Carolina longshoremen in New York. Local historians in the city itself point to the Jenkins Orphanage Band, whose young conductors danced on Northern street corners on fundraising tours. Either way, the "Charleston" carries the name of a city founded in 1670 as Charles Town, after Charles II, and only respelled Charleston after the Revolution, in 1783, when honoring an English king had become awkward.
The full story: Where does the word "Charleston" come from? →1COOKIE
Dutch "koekje" is a "little cake," and the Dutch of New Amsterdam kept baking them after the English took the colony in 1664. "Cookie" is recorded in American English from 1703, one of a handful of Dutch words, with "boss," "stoop," and "coleslaw," that New York gave the rest of the country. The British, who never had a Dutch colony to borrow from, call the same thing a biscuit.
The full story: Where does the word "cookie" come from? →2HURRICANE
The Taíno of the Caribbean called their storm god Juracán, and the Maya had a similar figure, Huracán, one of the creator gods of the Popol Vuh. Spanish sailors who met the storms brought the name home as "huracán" in the 1520s, and English borrowed it from Spanish a few decades later with no agreement about how to spell it; the Oxford English Dictionary records more than thirty variants before "hurricane" settled down.
The full story: Where does the word "hurricane" come from? →3AVERAGE
Arabic "awariya" meant damaged goods, and in the Mediterranean trade it came to mean specifically the loss when cargo was thrown overboard to save a ship. By an ancient rule, that loss was shared proportionally among everyone with goods aboard, and "average" entered English through Italian and French as the maritime term for that shared contribution. Only in the 1700s did the idea of dividing a total fairly among parties become the arithmetic mean.
The full story: Where does the word "average" come from? →4RIFLE
French "rifler" meant to scrape or scratch, and gunsmiths used it for cutting spiral grooves inside a barrel to spin the ball and steady its flight. The verb was in English by the 1630s; a "rifle" as a noun, a gun with such grooves, appears in the 1770s, just in time for American backwoodsmen to make it famous.
5LASSO
Spanish "lazo" is a snare or a knot, from Latin "laqueus," and the vaqueros of Mexico used it for the rope loop they threw from horseback. Anglo cowboys learned the rope and the word together, and "lasso" was in English by the 1760s, though English speakers moved the stress to the first syllable and kept it there.
6EMERALD
The stone's name has been borrowed at every stop: a Semitic word for a green stone passed into Greek as "smaragdos," into Latin as "smaragdus," and into Old French as "esmeraude," which is where English got "emerald" around 1300. The French added the initial "e" because French speakers couldn't start a word with "sm," and English kept it even though English speakers can.
7SAHARA
Arabic "sahra" means desert, and "sahara" is its plural. The Arabs who crossed it simply called it "the deserts," and when the name reached European maps it came as "Sahara," so that every English speaker who says "Sahara Desert" is saying "Desert Desert," which the desert has never objected to.
The full story: How did the Sahara get its name? →8TSUNAMI
On June 15, 1896, an earthquake off the Sanriku coast sent a wall of water into northeastern Japan that killed more than 20,000 people. The September issue of National Geographic reported it and introduced its readers to "tsunami," in italics, as the Japanese word for a great earthquake wave. The word means "harbor wave," since the waves were barely visible at sea and announced themselves only when they reached port. English kept calling them "tidal waves" for most of another century.
The full story: Where does the word "tsunami" come from? →9ORANGE
Sanskrit "naranga" became Persian "narang," Arabic "naranj," and Spanish "naranja," all with an "n" at the front. Somewhere between Spanish and French, speakers heard "une norenge" as "une orenge," attaching the "n" to the article, and English inherited the shortened form. "Orange" the color was named for the fruit in the 1500s; before that, English speakers called the color "yellow-red," which is why robins have red breasts.
10NEBRASKA
The Otoe called the river "Ñí Brásge," flat water, for the wide, shallow stream that French trappers had already named the Platte, French for the same thing. When the territory was organized in 1854 it took the Otoe name, and "Nebraska" became a state in 1867, named twice over for a river you can wade across.
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 say the same thing twice: a desert called Desert, a river called Flat Water in two languages, and a dance named for a city named for a king.