🚨 MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING 🚨
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 storm was named by a sea captain who got his Greek wrong, a delivery truck is half a Persian word, and the first spoiler was published on purpose.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word was invented to match another word, as a courtesy to a friend who had been calling his invention "little eye."
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One more beat.
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BonusMICROSCOPE
Galileo built an instrument for magnifying small things around 1609 and called it an "occhiolino," a little eye. The Accademia dei Lincei, the Roman scientific society he belonged to, had already coined "telescope" for his other instrument in 1611, and in 1625 a fellow member, the German physician Johannes Faber, proposed "microscope," small-looker, to give the pair matching names. Galileo accepted the gift, and the little eye was forgotten.
1MAGAZINE
Arabic "makhazin" is the plural of a word for storehouse, and when "magazine" reached English in the 1580s it meant a warehouse, especially one for gunpowder and arms, a sense that survives in the magazine of a rifle. In 1731 the London printer Edward Cave launched The Gentleman's Magazine and explained the name in his first issue: it was a storehouse of writing, collected from everywhere. His title was the first periodical to use the word, and within a generation it was the only sense most people knew.
2INSECT
Aristotle called the creatures "entoma," cut-in, for the notches that divide their bodies into segments; "entomology" preserves his word. Pliny the Elder, writing in Latin in the first century, translated it piece for piece as "insectum," from "insecare," to cut into, and that is the word English adopted around 1600. An "insect" is, in two languages, a thing with cuts in it.
3CYCLONE
Henry Piddington, a British ship captain who settled in Calcutta and spent his retirement studying the storms that wrecked ships in the Bay of Bengal, needed a general word for rotating storms and coined one in his 1848 Sailor's Horn-Book for the Law of Storms. He said he took "cyclone" from a Greek word meaning "the coil of a snake." The Greek word he had in mind, "kyklos," just means circle, but the storms do coil, and the name stuck.
4RUBRIC
Latin "rubrica" is red ochre, the pigment medieval scribes used for the parts of a manuscript that were not the main text: the headings, the chapter titles, and in service books the instructions for what the priest should do. Those red parts came to be called "rubrics," and the word has meant a heading or a set of rules ever since, which is why a teacher's scoring grid, a 20th-century borrowing, is still a rubric even when it is printed in black.
5OBOE
French "hautbois" is "high wood," a high-pitched woodwind, and English used the French spelling from the 1500s. When Italian musicians dominated European orchestras in the 1700s, English adopted their phonetic respelling of the same French word, "oboe," and the older "hautboy" faded out. The instrument did not change; only the spelling of its borrowed name.
6SPOILER
Doug Kenney, co-founder of National Lampoon, published a piece in the April 1971 issue headed "Spoilers," in which, with mock concern that suspense was bad for the nerves, he gave away the endings of more than fifty famous novels and films, Citizen Kane and Psycho among them. It is the earliest known use of "spoiler" in the plot sense, and it was not a warning. The warning came later, from the Usenet science-fiction groups of the 1980s, who put "spoiler" in subject lines so readers could look away.
7CARAVAN
Persian "karwan" was a company of travelers crossing the desert together for safety, and the word reached English through Arabic and French in the 1590s. In 1829 English speakers clipped it to "van" for a covered wagon, which became the delivery truck, and "caravan" itself went on, in Britain, to mean the trailer you tow to the seaside. Every van on the road is the back half of a Persian word.
8OPTIMISM
Leibniz argued in 1710 that God, being perfect, must have created the best of all possible worlds, the "optimum." In 1737 the Jesuit reviewers of the Mémoires de Trévoux labeled his doctrine "optimisme," and Voltaire took the label and the doctrine apart in Candide in 1759, whose subtitle is "or Optimism" and whose Dr. Pangloss keeps insisting all is for the best while everything goes wrong. "Optimism" entered English through Voltaire's translators the same year, as the name of a philosophy being mocked, and only later softened into a temperament.
9PUNDIT
Sanskrit "pandita" is a learned man, a scholar of the Hindu scriptures, and the British in India used "pundit" from the 1600s for the Brahmin scholars who advised their courts on Hindu law. The East India Company also gave the title to the Indian surveyors it trained to map Tibet in secret. The modern sense of someone paid to have opinions on television is an American extension of the 1800s, and the scholars would not recognize it.
10ESSAY
Michel de Montaigne published a collection of short, wandering, personal pieces in 1580 and called them "Essais," attempts or trials, from the French verb "essayer," to try, because he thought of each one as a test of his own judgment rather than a finished argument. Francis Bacon borrowed the title for his own collection in 1597, and "essay" became the English word for the form. Every school essay is, by name, an attempt, which is a kinder way to think of it.
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 names chosen to match something else: a word built to rhyme with "telescope," a Latin word translated piece by piece from Greek, and a title borrowed from a Frenchman by an Englishman who liked the sound of it.