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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 brilliant medieval philosopher became the word for a blockhead, a country was named after a village, and a science-fiction fan's insult became a genre.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is the name of a port on the wrong continent, as copied down by Marco Polo.
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BonusMADAGASCAR
Marco Polo never saw the island. In the account of his travels, dictated in the 1290s, he describes a rich land he calls "Madeigascar," and the name seems to be a garbled version of Mogadishu, the port on the Somali coast, picked up from Arab sailors and attached to the wrong place. The Portuguese captain Diogo Dias landed on the real island on St. Lawrence's Day in 1500 and named it São Lourenço, but Renaissance mapmakers preferred Polo's word, and "Madagascar" it has been ever since. The island had no single native name for the Europeans to displace.
The full story: How did Madagascar get its name? →1MARMALADE
The Portuguese "marmelada" is quince paste, from "marmelo," quince, and that is what "marmalade" meant when it reached England: a stiff, sliceable preserve, shipped in boxes and cut into squares. It appears in a merchant's letter of 1480 and in the provisions packed for Mary Tudor's journey to France in 1514. Oranges took over the word only later, and Scotland made the orange version famous. The story that it honors a seasick Mary, Queen of Scots, from a French phrase meaning "Mary is ill," is an invention that first circulated in the early 1900s.
The full story: Where does the word "marmalade" come from? →2ASTROTURF
James Faria and Robert Wright of Monsanto patented a synthetic playing surface in 1965 and sold it as ChemGrass, after a 1964 test installation at the Moses Brown School in Providence, Rhode Island. The Houston Astrodome, whose glass roof had killed its real grass, laid it in 1966, and a Monsanto employee named John Wortmann renamed the product "AstroTurf" for the stadium's home team. The brand name became the generic word, and in the 1980s it became a verb for fake grassroots politics.
The full story: How did AstroTurf get its name? →3DUNCE
John Duns Scotus, born around 1265 in Duns in the Scottish Borders, was the Subtle Doctor, one of the most admired theologians of the Middle Ages, and his followers were called Dunsmen or Dunses. When sixteenth-century humanists attacked the old scholastic hair-splitting, the Dunses defended it, and their master's name became a byword for anyone deaf to new learning. By 1587 "dunce" meant a blockhead outright; the conical cap is first recorded in 1810, in a satire on Thomas Jefferson. The sharpest mind of his century is remembered as the slowest child in the class.
The full story: Where does the word "dunce" come from? →4AMSTERDAM
Around 1270 the people living where the little river Amstel met the IJ built a dam across it, and the settlement became "Amestelledamme," the dam on the Amstel. On October 27, 1275, Count Floris V of Holland granted its inhabitants freedom from tolls on goods moved through his county, the oldest document to use the name, and Amsterdam celebrates that date as its birthday. The dam is still there, under the paving of Dam Square.
The full story: How did Amsterdam get its name? →5GUNG HO
The Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, founded in 1937 to put displaced workers to use against the Japanese invasion, were known by a two-character abbreviation, "gonghe," which their foreign supporters rendered as "work together." Evans Carlson, a Marine officer who had traveled with the Chinese Eighth Route Army, took the phrase as the motto of his 2nd Raider Battalion in February 1942. Reporters covering the Raiders' Makin Island raid that August called it their battle cry, and a 1943 film titled Gung Ho! made it national slang for zealous enthusiasm.
The full story: Where does the phrase "gung ho" come from? →6ACADEMY
Outside the walls of Athens there was a grove sacred to a legendary hero named Akademos, and around 387 BC Plato began teaching there. His school took the grove's name, and so, in time, did every school after it: English had "academy" for any place of higher learning by the 1540s, the French Academy guarded the language from 1635, and since 1927 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has handed out Oscars. Plato's olive grove is now a park in a quiet Athens neighborhood.
7SPACE OPERA
Radio serials sponsored by soap companies were "soap operas," and formulaic Westerns were "horse operas," so when the fan writer Wilson Tucker wanted a name for the hackneyed, worn-out spaceship yarn he coined "space opera" in his fanzine Le Zombie in January 1941. It was an insult. The term was rehabilitated in the 1970s, when Star Wars made the grand, melodramatic, galaxy-spanning adventure respectable again, and it is now a genre label people put on their own books.
8CANADA
In 1535 two young Iroquoian guides, taken back to France by Jacques Cartier the year before, used the word "kanata," village, to direct him toward their settlement of Stadacona, where Quebec City now stands. Cartier wrote it down as the name of the place and the chief's territory around it. By 1547 maps labeled everything north of the St. Lawrence "Canada," the name spread west with the fur trade, and in 1867 Confederation made it official. A country of ten million square kilometers is named "village."
The full story: How did Canada get its name? →9AGNOSTIC
Thomas Huxley, Darwin's great defender, joined London's Metaphysical Society at its founding in 1869 and found that every other member had a label for his beliefs. Feeling, he said, like the fox in the fable that had lost its tail, he invented one for himself: "agnostic," the antithesis of "gnostic," the ancient name for those who claimed to know the divine mysteries. He meant it as a method, demanding evidence before belief, rather than a creed, and spent an 1889 essay insisting on the point.
The full story: Where does the word "agnostic" come from? →10RADIUM
On December 26, 1898, Pierre and Marie Curie, with their collaborator Gustave Bémont, announced a new element in the residues of uranium ore and named it "radium," from the Latin "radius," a ray, because its radiation was millions of times more intense than uranium's. Marie Curie isolated a tenth of a gram of its chloride in 1902, after processing tons of ore, and the pure metal in 1910. The Latin for ray also gave the word "radioactivity," which she had coined the same year.
That's today's set. Come back tomorrow for another ten, and if there's a thread running under this batch, it's names that landed in the wrong place: a Somali port on an Indian Ocean island, a single village on half a continent, and a theologian's hometown on the slowest kid in school.