🚨 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.
Still with us? Alright, scroll slowly. We've left some buffer so nothing spoils by accident.
⌄ ⌄ ⌄ keep scrolling ⌄ ⌄ ⌄
Somewhere below, a Roman poet accused a rival of kidnapping, a spilled glass of wine became a candy wrapper, and the room where presidents work was named by reporters.
⌄ ⌄ ⌄
Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is an ethnic slur that a company decided to keep.
⌄ ⌄ ⌄
One more beat.
⌄ ⌄ ⌄ last chance ⌄ ⌄ ⌄
BonusSCOTCH TAPE
In 1925 Richard Drew, a young 3M lab worker, was testing a paper masking tape for auto-body shops, where two-tone paint jobs were in fashion and the painters needed a clean line. To keep it from pulling paint off, he had put adhesive only along the edges, and it fell off. According to 3M's own company history, a painter told him to take the tape back to his "Scotch" bosses and tell them to put more adhesive on it, "Scotch" then being an everyday slur for stingy. The company adopted the jab as a brand name, and when Drew developed a transparent cellophane tape in 1930, it became "Scotch Tape," and the slur became a household word.
The full story: How did Scotch Tape get its name? →1SABBATICAL
Leviticus orders fields to lie fallow every seventh year, and English had the adjective "sabbatical" for that rule from the 1590s. In 1880 Harvard became the first American university to grant its professors a "sabbatical" year, one year in seven at half pay for "health, rest, study, or the prosecution of original work," as President Charles Eliot reported in 1881. Cornell and Wellesley followed in 1886, and the word has since escaped the campus for anyone who takes a long break and wants it to sound earned.
The full story: Where does the word "sabbatical" come from? →2CELLOPHANE
Jacques Brandenberger, a Swiss chemist working for a French textile firm, watched a customer spill wine on a restaurant tablecloth in 1908 and set out to make a cloth that would shrug off stains. His viscose coating made the fabric too stiff, but it peeled away as a clear, flexible sheet, and he changed projects. By 1912 he had a machine to make the sheet and a name for it, "cellophane," from cellulose and "diaphane," the French for transparent. Whitman's wrapped its Sampler chocolates in it that year, and DuPont's 1927 moisture-proof version made it the wrapper of everything.
The full story: Where does the word "cellophane" come from? →3OVAL OFFICE
William Taft, who wanted a grander workplace than Theodore Roosevelt's rectangular office, had the architect Nathan Wyeth build him an oval room in the enlarged West Wing in 1909, echoing the three oval rooms James Hoban had drawn into the White House in 1792 for George Washington's formal receptions. In 1934 Eric Gugler moved the room to the southeast corner, next to the Rose Garden, for Franklin Roosevelt. For its first quarter century it was just "the president's office"; "Oval Office" became its name in print during Roosevelt's years, when reporters who crowded into his press conferences there needed something to call it.
4THESAURUS
Greek "thesauros" is a treasure or a storehouse, and from the 1500s scholars used the Latin form as a title for monumental dictionaries, the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae of 1532 and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae of 1572 among them. Peter Mark Roget, a physician who had started a private list of words grouped by meaning in 1805, published it in 1852 as a "Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases," and his title became the common noun for every book of synonyms since. Roget's has never been out of print.
The full story: Where does the word "thesaurus" come from? →5COPPER
Cyprus supplied the Roman world with the metal, and Latin called it "aes Cyprium," Cyprian bronze, which wore down to "cuprum." Old English borrowed that as "copor," first recorded about 950 in a medical recipe, and it became "copper." It is one of the few metals named for where it came from rather than for what it does, and the chemical symbol Cu still points at the island.
6HORMONE
William Bayliss and Ernest Starling showed in 1902 that the gut releases a substance, secretin, into the blood that makes the pancreas work, the first proof that organs could signal each other chemically rather than through nerves. Starling needed a word for the class. At a Cambridge dinner, the biologist William Hardy and a classicist colleague, W. T. Vesey, suggested the Greek verb "hormao," to set in motion, and Starling introduced "hormone" in his Croonian Lectures at the Royal College of Physicians in 1905.
7TEXAS
The Caddo word "taysha" means friend or ally, and the Hasinai people of East Texas used it in greeting the Spanish. When missionaries founded San Francisco de los Tejas in 1690, they applied the word, with a Spanish plural, to the Hasinai and then to their country, and "Texas" was in English gazetteers by 1797. The state motto, adopted in 1930, is "Friendship," which is the name translated back.
The full story: How did Texas get its name? →8ATTIC
Classical architects called a low decorative storey above a building's main cornice an "attic," because it was done in the style of Attica, the region around Athens, with small pilasters instead of full columns. English builders used "attic storey" from the 1690s for that upper band, and by the mid 1800s the word had slipped inside to mean the room under the roof, however plain. Every attic is, by name, Athenian.
9PLAGIARISM
The Roman poet Martial, in the first century, had a rival named Fidentinus who recited Martial's epigrams as his own, and Martial answered in verse, calling him a "plagiarius," a kidnapper, a man who steals someone else's slave or child. His poems were his children, and Fidentinus had made off with them. The insult lay unused for fifteen centuries until Ben Jonson revived it in 1601 as "plagiary," and "plagiarism" was in Johnson's dictionary by 1755.
The full story: Where does the word "plagiarism" come from? →10EGGHEAD
"Egghead" meant a bald man when it first appeared in print in 1907, and by 1918 Chicago newspapermen were using it for an intellectual, someone whose head was all dome. It became a national word in 1952, when the columnist Stewart Alsop quoted his brother John on the sort of people who were for Adlai Stevenson, and Stevenson, who was himself bald, took the label with a joke: "Eggheads of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your yolks."
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 insults that got promoted: a slur on Scottish thrift that became a brand, a kidnapping charge that became a scholarly offense, and a crack about bald men that became a political badge.