🚨 MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING 🚨
Today's Origins Quiz answers, all ten of them plus the bonus word, are below. If you haven't played yet, this is your cue to go do that first.
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Somewhere below, a steak was knighted by three different kings, a naval rank got an extra letter from a monk's guess, and the word for idle chatter started out meaning your godmother.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is a symbol you have typed a thousand times, and nobody is sure who drew it first.
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One more beat.
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BonusDOLLAR SIGN
The best-documented theory is the simplest. Spanish pesos were abbreviated "ps," and in the ledgers of 18th-century traders the "s" gradually got written on top of the "p" until only a vertical stroke of the "p" survived. The earliest known example is in the 1778 correspondence of Oliver Pollock, an Irish-born New Orleans merchant who was bankrolling the American Revolution with Spanish money, and Archibald Binny claimed the first printed one in Philadelphia in the 1790s. Rival theories derive the "dollar sign" from the ribbon-wrapped Pillars of Hercules on Spanish coins, or from a monogram on coins struck at Potosí, and none of them has been settled.
The full story: Where does the dollar sign come from? →1DERBY
After the first running of the Oaks in 1779, Edward Smith-Stanley, the 12th Earl of Derby, hosted a dinner at which he and Sir Charles Bunbury, steward of the Jockey Club, planned a new race for three-year-olds. Legend says they tossed a coin for the naming rights; more likely Bunbury deferred to his host. The first "Derby" was run at Epsom on May 4, 1780, and Bunbury's colt Diomed won it, so he got the prize money and the earl got the word, which now names a hat, a horse race on three continents, and any local rivalry.
2OUNCE
Latin "uncia" meant a twelfth, and specifically a twelfth of the Roman pound, the "libra" that survives in the abbreviation "lb." The word came into English through Old French as "ounce," and the sixteen-ounce pound is a later English invention; the troy pound used for gold still has the Roman twelve.
3LATTE
"Latte" is Italian for milk, and nothing else. The drink is a "caffè latte," coffee with milk, and the English habit of dropping the coffee half dates only to the 1980s, when the phrase was clipped in American cafes. Ask for "un latte" in a bar in Rome and you will be handed a glass of milk, politely.
The full story: Where does the word "latte" come from? →4LOGISTICS
French "logistique" comes from "loger," to lodge, and it began as the quartermaster's art of finding beds and bread for an army on the move. The Swiss general Antoine-Henri Jomini gave it a formal definition in his 1838 Summary of the Art of War, as the practical business of moving and supplying troops, and "logistics" reached English from his translators. Business adopted it in the 20th century, and the word now mostly means trucks.
5ADMIRAL
Arabic "amir al-" means "commander of the," the first half of titles like "amir al-bahr," commander of the sea. Crusaders and Sicilian Normans heard the phrase so often that they took it for a single word, and medieval Latin writers, assuming it must be related to "admirari," to admire, inserted a "d" that was never there. "Admiral" is, letter for letter, a misunderstanding.
6REGATTA
Venetian "regata" named the gondola races on the Grand Canal, from a dialect verb meaning to compete or to strive, and the city had been staging them since the 1200s. English travelers borrowed "regatta" in the 1650s, and the first English event to use the name was a rowing race on the Thames in 1775, after which it came to mean any boat race, gondolas optional.
7SIRLOIN
French "surlonge" is the "sur," above, plus the "longe," the loin: the cut that sits over it. English had it as "serlyn" in 1525 and "surloin" for a century after. Then a story got loose that a king, so delighted by the beef that he drew his sword and knighted it "Sir Loin," had given it the name. Thomas Fuller printed the tale in 1655 and credited Henry VIII; later versions gave it to James I at Hoghton Tower in 1617, or to Charles II. None of it happened, but the spelling changed to match the joke, and "sirloin" has been a knight ever since.
The full story: Where does the word "sirloin" come from? →8INTOXICATE
Greek "toxon" is a bow, and "toxikon pharmakon" was the poison smeared on arrowheads. Latin shortened that to "toxicum," poison, and "intoxicate" entered English in the 1400s meaning to poison someone. The drunken sense took over within a century, and Shakespeare's Fluellen uses it that way in Henry V. "Toxic" itself, oddly, didn't appear in English until the 1660s, a hundred years after people had started getting intoxicated.
9GOSSIP
Old English "godsibb" was a godparent, literally "God-kin," the person who stood sponsor at a baptism. By 1300 it meant any close companion, and in particular the women friends who sat with a mother through a birth, and by the 1560s "gossip" meant what they talked about while they waited. The sense of groundless rumor is recorded from 1811.
The full story: Where does the word "gossip" come from? →10NEGOTIATE
Latin "otium" was leisure, and "negotium," literally "not leisure," was the Romans' word for business. "Negotiate" entered English in the 1590s meaning to conduct business, and narrowed to haggling over terms soon after. The etymology is a fair description of how most negotiations feel.
That's today's set, the second of a three-day run. Come back tomorrow for ten more, and if there's a thread running under this batch, it's errors that stuck: a letter nobody meant to add, a knighthood nobody conferred, and a symbol nobody can quite trace.