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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, close this tab, go solve today's puzzle, and come back afterward. We'll wait.
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Somewhere below, a hair product was a head massage for a hundred years, a weapon is named after a fish, and a philosopher of plain bread became a byword for gluttony.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is a process everyone associates with milk, invented by a man who was trying to save wine.
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BonusPASTEURIZE
Napoleon III asked Louis Pasteur to find out why so much French wine was spoiling in the barrel, and in the summer of 1864, working in Arbois in the Jura, Pasteur found that heating the wine briefly to 50 or 60 degrees Celsius killed the microbes responsible without hurting the taste. He patented the method the next year. Milk was not treated until the 1880s, after the German chemist Franz von Soxhlet proposed it in 1886, and New York did not require it until 1910. To "pasteurize" is to do to milk what Pasteur did to Burgundy.
1PUNCH
The familiar story is that "punch" comes from Hindi "panch," five, for the five ingredients East India Company sailors mixed in the 1600s: spirits, sugar, lemon, water, and spice. The story has a problem. It was first told by the traveler John Fryer in 1698, but the English word is recorded in 1632, and the number of ingredients was never fixed at five. A rival theory derives it from "puncheon," a size of cask the drink was shipped in, and the honest answer is that nobody knows.
2ATLANTIC
Herodotus, writing around 450 BC, called the sea beyond the Pillars of Hercules "Atlantis thalassa," the sea of Atlas, after the Titan who held up the sky and whose name was already attached to the mountains of Morocco. "Atlantic" reached English in the 1400s, and for centuries it meant only the stretch near Africa before it was extended to the whole ocean.
3SHAMPOO
Hindi "champo" is the imperative of a verb meaning to press or knead, and when "shampoo" entered English in 1762 it meant a vigorous head and body massage, the kind Indian barbers gave. Sake Dean Mahomed, a Bengali entrepreneur, opened a "shampooing" bathhouse in Brighton in 1814, treated the gentry and eventually George IV, and made the word fashionable. The sense of washing hair with soap is not recorded until 1860.
The full story: Where does the word "shampoo" come from? →4TORPEDO
The Romans named the electric ray "torpedo," from "torpere," to be numb, for the shock it gave anyone who stepped on it. In 1800, Robert Fulton, the American inventor then trying to sell a submarine to Napoleon, borrowed the fish's name for the explosive charges his boat would plant under enemy hulls, and later pitched the same "torpedoes" to the British. The self-propelled version that made the word famous did not arrive until 1866.
The full story: How did the torpedo get its name? →5EPICURE
Epicurus taught in a garden outside Athens in the 300s BC that pleasure was the highest good, by which he meant the absence of pain and fear, friendship, and a simple diet; he is on record asking a friend for a pot of cheese so he could feast when he wished. His rivals, the Stoics especially, caricatured the school as a pigsty of gluttons, and the caricature outlived the philosophy. An "epicure" in English, from the 1500s on, is a connoisseur of food, which would have puzzled the man.
6UNIVERSITY
Medieval Latin "universitas" meant the whole of anything, and in legal use any corporation or guild: a universitas of bakers, of weavers. When the masters and students at Bologna and Paris organized themselves in the 1100s, they were a "universitas magistrorum et scholarium," a guild of teachers and scholars, and the word for the guild became the word for the school. "University" is, at root, a trade union.
7ROSEMARY
Latin "ros marinus" is "dew of the sea," because the shrub grows wild on Mediterranean cliffs close enough to the water to be wet with spray. Middle English had it as "rosmarine," and in the 1400s speakers reshaped it into "rosemary," as though it were a rose plus the name Mary, which it is not, though the Virgin Mary stories attached to it afterward.
8INCH
Latin "uncia," a twelfth, was borrowed straight into Old English as "ynce" before the Norman Conquest, which is why "inch" looks nothing like the French-filtered "ounce," its twin. One is a twelfth of a foot, the other was a twelfth of a pound, and the two words have not recognized each other for a thousand years.
9ZIPPER
Gideon Sundback perfected the device in 1913 and called it, in his patent, the "separable fastener"; the company that made it sold it as the "hookless fastener." Neither name caught on. In 1923, the B.F. Goodrich Company put the fastener on a line of rubber galoshes and, liking the sound the boots made when closed, called them "Zipper" boots. The name slid off the boots and onto the fastener within a few years, and Goodrich's trademark lawsuits could not get it back.
The full story: Where does the word "zipper" come from? →10EUPHEMISM
Greek "euphemismos" is "speaking well," and in religious use it meant choosing words of good omen, or keeping a reverent silence, so as not to offend the gods during a sacrifice. "Euphemism" entered English in the 1650s as a rhetorical term and has been the polite word for the impolite thing ever since.
The full story: Where does the word "euphemism" come from? →That's today's set, and the last of a three-day run. Come back tomorrow for another ten, and if there's a thread running under this batch, it's words that drifted a long way from the job they were hired for: a massage that became a hair wash, a fish that became a weapon, and a guild that became a campus.