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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 US state was named with a word a lobbyist made up on the spot, a printing plate became a prejudice, and a cartoon woman on a fake book jacket gave publishing one of its favorite words.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word was a psychiatric term, and a murder defense, before an ad man turned it into a meeting.
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One more beat.
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BonusBRAINSTORM
George Gould's 1894 medical dictionary defined a "brainstorm" as a sudden, severe disturbance caused by some cerebral upset, and in March 1907 a defense witness used the word to explain why Harry Thaw had shot the architect Stanford White on the roof of Madison Square Garden. The Washington Post noted that New York had a new piece of slang. By the late 1920s Americans were using it for a flash of inspiration instead, and in 1939 Alex Osborn, a founder of the advertising agency BBDO, began running group sessions to generate ideas, which his staff took to calling brainstorm sessions. He described them in his 1942 book How to Think Up, and the meeting-room sense has owned the word ever since.
The full story: Where does the word "brainstorm" come from? →1BLURB
Gelett Burgess, the humorist behind "The Purple Cow," made a limited edition of his book Are You a Bromide? for the American Booksellers' Association dinner on May 16, 1907, and dressed it in a parody jacket. It showed a gushing young woman labeled Miss Belinda Blurb, "in the act of blurbing," over copy that asked whether this book was not a 90 horse-power six-cylinder seller. Burgess later defined the word as "to make a sound like a publisher." The New York Times reported the joke the same day, and publishers adopted the insult as a job title.
The full story: Where does the word "blurb" come from? →2RUGBY
The story that William Webb Ellis, a pupil at Rugby School, picked up the ball during a football match in 1823 and ran with it was first told in 1876 by Matthew Bloxam, an old boy who had not been at the school at the time and who cited an unnamed informant. Webb Ellis had died in 1872. An 1895 inquiry by the Old Rugbeian Society found the story unlikely, not least because the school had no written football rules for him to break. The sport took the school's name anyway, and the World Cup trophy is still the Webb Ellis Cup.
The full story: Where does the word "rugby" come from? →3AUTOMATION
Delmar Harder, a Ford vice president, set up an "Automation Department" at the company's Cleveland engine plant in April 1947, with a brief to find cheap, reliable ways of moving parts between machines without hands. Each device had to cost under 3,000 dollars and pay for itself within a year, which meant each one had to replace at least one worker. The word spread through the industry from there, and the Oxford English Dictionary's first printed example is in American Machinist in October 1948.
4IDAHO
George Willing, a lobbyist for the Pike's Peak mining region, proposed "Idaho" as the name for a new territory in 1860 and told Congress it was a Native word meaning "gem of the mountains." No such word exists in any Native language, and the meaning appears to have been his own invention, which he is said to have later admitted. Congress chose Colorado instead in 1861, but the name had already attached itself to a Colorado mining camp, a Columbia River steamboat and a county farther west, and in 1863 it became Idaho Territory, then the 43rd state in 1890. The most plausible real source is a Kiowa-Apache word for the Comanche, meaning "enemy."
The full story: How did Idaho get its name? →5NORMANDY
In 911 King Charles the Simple, having failed to dislodge the Viking leader Rollo from the lower Seine, made a deal with him at Saint-Clair-sur-Epte: the land in exchange for baptism and a promise to keep other raiders out. Latin documents called Rollo's people "Nortmanni," men of the North, and the region, until then part of Neustria, became "Normandy," the Northmen's land. A century and a half later Rollo's great-great-great-grandson, William, conquered England.
6STEREOTYPE
French printers of the 1790s, Firmin Didot's firm above all, perfected a way of casting a whole page of set type as a single solid metal plate, so that it could be printed again and again without the letters shifting; they called the plate a "stereotype," from the Greek for solid. By 1850 the word meant any image repeated without change, and in 1922 the journalist Walter Lippmann, in Public Opinion, used it for "the pictures in our heads," the fixed and simplified ideas we carry about groups of people. The printing plate is gone; its name is everywhere.
7THINK TANK
"Think tank" was American slang for the head by 1905, the tank in which thinking happened, and it stayed a joke for half a century. In 1959 the Times Literary Supplement applied it to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, and through the 1960s it attached itself to RAND and the other policy research shops of the Cold War. The skull sense died; the institution sense took over the phrase.
8ORCHID
The Greek "orkhis" means testicle, and the ancients used it for the plant because the paired tubers of the European species look like a pair. English kept the Latin form "orchis" from the 1560s, and Middle English had called the plant "ballockwort." The botanist John Lindley introduced "orchid" in his 1845 School Botany, wrongly assuming the Latin stem had a "d" in it, and the error became the standard spelling.
9RHINESTONE
The original stones were clear quartz pebbles gathered from the gravel of the Rhine, cut and sold as cheap sparkle. In the 1730s Georg Friedrich Strass, a jeweler in Strasbourg, perfected a lead glass imitation of diamond, brightened by a metal foil backing, and did so well that he was named jeweler to the French king in 1734. The glass stones took the river's name in English as "rhinestones," and Strass's own name survives as the word for them in most of Europe.
10MASCOT
Edmond Audran's comic opera La Mascotte opened in Paris in December 1880, about a farm girl who brings luck to whoever keeps her, and its English adaptation in 1881 carried the word into the language. French "mascotte" came from Provençal "mascoto," a charm or spell, related to "masco," a witch. By 1889 American ball clubs kept animals, and sometimes small boys, as "mascots" for luck, and the costumed version came later.
The full story: Where does the word "mascot" come from? →That's today's set. Come back tomorrow for another ten, and if there's a thread running under this batch, it's words that changed jobs: a mental breakdown that became a meeting, a kidnapped printing term that became a prejudice, and a 1905 joke about skulls that became an industry.