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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 colonel's last order became an adjective, a Latin fireplace became a camera setting, and a pasta is named for the pot it was cooked in, which was named for a worse kind of pot.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word exists because a TV series and a Brian De Palma comedy got to the first title first.
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One more beat.
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BonusGOODFELLAS
Nicholas Pileggi's 1985 book about Henry Hill was called Wiseguy, and Martin Scorsese's film of it was called Wise Guy through years of development. By the time it was ready to shoot, Brian De Palma had released a 1986 comedy called Wise Guys and CBS was airing a crime series called Wiseguy, and Scorsese and Pileggi gave up the title rather than share it. "Goodfellas," the term the characters use for each other, went on the poster in 1990. The book is still Wiseguy; the film that made it famous never got to use the name.
1GASLIGHT
In Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play, a husband hunting for hidden jewels in the flat upstairs dims the gas lamps in his own house and tells his wife she is imagining it, part of a campaign to make her doubt her own mind. The 1944 Hollywood film with Ingrid Bergman made the plot famous, and by 1948 a Miami newspaper was reporting divorce complaints in which a husband gave his wife "the gaslight treatment." The verb itself is first found in a 1961 academic book and stayed rare until the 2010s, when it became one of the most-looked-up words in the language.
The full story: Where does the word "gaslight" come from? →2OZARK
French traders in the 1700s wrote "aux Arkansas," to the Arkansas, for the post they kept among the Quapaw, whom they called the Arkansas, and shortened it on maps and in letters to "aux Arcs." English speakers heard that as a single word, and "Ozark" became the name of the whole upland between the Missouri and Arkansas rivers. The stories about arches, rainbows and bows are later guesses at a French phrase that was only ever an abbreviation.
3ONION
Latin "unio" meant oneness, and Roman country people used it both for a single large pearl and for the plant whose concentric layers make up one bulb, as opposed to garlic, which splits into cloves. The word came into English through French around 1100, and "onion" has carried its pearl-and-unity image ever since, invisible under the tears.
4DIEHARD
At the Battle of Albuera in May 1811, Lieutenant-Colonel William Inglis of the 57th (West Middlesex) Regiment of Foot was hit by canister shot, refused to be carried from the field, and lay by the regimental colours shouting "Die hard, 57th, die hard!" as the French attacked. The regiment lost more than two thirds of its men and kept its ground, and was the Die Hards from then on. A century later "diehard" was a political label for the Conservative peers who fought the 1911 Parliament Act to the last, and in 1988 it became a film about a man in a vest.
5FOCUS
Latin "focus" is the hearth, the fireplace at the center of a Roman house and, by extension, the home itself. In 1604 Johannes Kepler used it for the point at which a lens or mirror brings light together, probably because a burning glass starts a fire at exactly that point, and the mathematicians kept it for the special points of an ellipse. Thomas Hobbes carried it into English in the 1650s, and by 1796 it meant any center of activity. Every time a camera finds its focus it is, in Latin, finding the fireplace.
6ELEANOR RIGBY
Paul McCartney said the name came from two places: the actress Eleanor Bron, who had appeared with the Beatles in Help!, and a wine merchant's sign in Bristol, Rigby & Evens, that he passed while visiting Jane Asher at the theatre there. Years later a gravestone for an Eleanor Rigby, who died in 1939, was found in St Peter's churchyard in Woolton, a few yards from where McCartney first met John Lennon at the 1957 church fete, and McCartney conceded the name may have been sitting in his memory. He still says the lonely woman in the song was invented.
7LASAGNA
Greek "lasanon" was a trivet or pot stand, and also, in everyday use, a chamber pot. The Romans borrowed it as "lasanum," a cooking pot, and the vulgar Latin "lasania" that grew from it named the dish that was cooked in one, the way "casserole" still names both the pan and the dinner. The Italian word for the layered dish is recorded in 1281, and English borrowed "lasagna" in 1760. The chamber pot is the oldest part of the family tree, and Italian etymologists prefer not to mention it.
The full story: Where does the word "lasagna" come from? →8LOZENGE
Old French "losenge" was a diamond shape, a rhombus, and English used "lozenge" for that figure in heraldry from the early 1300s and for anything cut into it, including small cakes and wafers. By the 1520s apothecaries were pressing sugar and medicine into little diamond-shaped tablets to dissolve in the mouth, and the shape gave its name to the remedy. Modern throat lozenges are mostly round, and nobody has told the word.
9ACCOMPLICE
The 15th-century English word was "complice," an associate or partner, from a Late Latin word meaning folded together. The extra syllable at the front is, in the etymologists' phrase, unetymological: it came either from the article in "a complice" being run into the noun, or from the pull of "accomplish," which sounded like it ought to be related. By the 1580s "accomplice" meant a partner in crime specifically, and the innocent "complice" disappeared.
10SHREK
William Steig, a New Yorker cartoonist who began writing children's books at 61, named the ogre in his 1990 picture book with the Yiddish word for fright or terror, "shrek," a cousin of the German "Schreck." In the book the ogre's parents kick him out of the swamp into the world, where he is pleased to find everything disgusting. DreamWorks bought it, and "Shrek" became a word for a green ogre rather than for fear.
The full story: Where does the name Shrek 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 carry a hidden object: a fireplace inside every camera, a chamber pot under every lasagna, and a pearl inside every onion.