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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 hangman became a crane, a Hungarian village became a tutor, and the most famous album of the 1980s was almost called Starlight.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is about a seamstress who mended the band's clothes, and the lyric says so.
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One more beat.
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BonusTINY DANCER
Bernie Taupin met Maxine Feibelman in 1970, on Elton John's first American tour, when a friend of hers turned up at the band's hotel with a hair dryer the drummer needed. She was a seamstress, and traveled with the band mending its stage clothes; the lyric's "seamstress for the band" is simply a description of her job. Taupin wrote "Tiny Dancer" early in their courtship, and they married in Lincolnshire on March 27, 1971, with Elton John as best man, a few months before the song came out on Madman Across the Water. The marriage lasted six years; the song has lasted somewhat longer.
1THRILLER
Rod Temperton's first version of the song was called "Starlight," and Quincy Jones liked it enough to want it as the album's title track, but not with that title. Temperton went home and wrote out hundreds of alternatives, got as far as "Midnight Man," and then landed on "Thriller," which he worried was "a crap word to sing." Jones had Michael Jackson spit it into the microphone a few times, and the problem went away. The word itself, for a suspense story, dates to the 1880s.
2INDIANA JONES
George Lucas had an Alaskan malamute called Indiana, the same dog who, riding beside him in the car, inspired Chewbacca. When Lucas and Philip Kaufman sketched an adventurer in the 1970s he was Indiana Smith, and Steven Spielberg, who disliked the surname, swapped it for Jones. The third film made the joke official: Indiana Jones is really Henry Jones Jr., his father calls him Junior, and when Indy objects, his father points out that they named the dog Indiana.
The full story: Where does the name Indiana Jones come from? →3NECTAR
Greek "nektar" was the drink of the gods, and the word may be an ancient poetic compound: "nek-," death, plus a second element meaning to overcome, so that the gods' drink is "death-overcoming," which is what it did for them. English borrowed "nectar" in the 1550s for the divine drink, used it for any delicious one by the 1580s, and by 1600 had applied it to the sweet liquid in flowers, which is where bees and most of us now meet it.
4YOGURT
The Turkish word is built on a verb meaning to knead, and in a secondary sense to curdle or thicken, which is what milk does when the right bacteria get into it. An older form appears in Old Uyghur texts from before the year 1000 and in Mahmud al-Kashgari's great Turkic dictionary of the 1070s. "Yogurt" reached English in the early 1600s through travelers' accounts of the Ottoman lands, and English has never agreed on how to spell it.
The full story: Where does the word "yogurt" come from? →5DERRICK
Around 1600 the hangman at Tyburn, London's public gallows, was a man surnamed Derrick, and he was notorious enough that playwrights of the day used his name as a byword for the gallows and for the hangman's trade. The gallows was a post with a beam, and when 18th-century sailors and builders rigged a post with a pivoting boom for lifting heavy loads, they called it a "derrick" too, by 1727. The tall frame over an American oil well took the name in 1861. The executioner's name is now on every drilling rig in Texas.
6AMBITION
Latin "ambitio" is literally a going around, from "ambire," to go about, and its specific sense was the circuit a Roman candidate made of the Forum, canvassing citizens for their votes. The word was never flattering: it meant the courting of favor, and when "ambition" reached English in the 1300s it was listed with pride and vainglory among the vices. The approving modern sense, a worthy goal, came much later and never entirely shook off the Roman politician working the crowd.
7NEUTRON
Ernest Rutherford proposed in 1920 that the nucleus might contain a particle with no charge, a proton and an electron bound together, and in 1921 the American chemist William Harkins gave the hypothetical thing a name, "neutron," from the Latin for neither and the Greek ending that "electron" and "proton" already wore. Nobody could find it for eleven years. James Chadwick finally caught it in 1932 and won the Nobel Prize for the discovery in 1935, by which point the name was already waiting for it.
8COACH
Kocs is a village in Hungary where, in the 15th century, wainwrights built a light, fast carriage with a suspended body, and "kocsi szekér," the Kocs cart, traveled across Europe with the vehicle itself, becoming "coche" in French and "coach" in English by the 1550s. Oxford students of the 1830s borrowed it for a private tutor who carried them through an exam, as a coach carries a passenger, and by 1861 it meant anyone who trained athletes. Every sports coach is, by name, a Hungarian carriage.
9EXCELSIOR
Latin "excelsior" means "higher," and New York put it on its state seal in 1778 as a one-word motto. Longfellow borrowed it in 1841 for a poem about a youth who climbs an Alpine pass carrying a banner with that single word on it, ignores every warning, and is found dead in the snow, still clutching it. The poem was so widely memorized that the word became a joke, and a trade name, and eventually the name of the curly wood shavings used to pack fragile goods, which is where most people now meet it.
10RAMBO
David Morrell was writing his 1972 novel First Blood and could not name his Vietnam veteran. His wife came home with apples from a Pennsylvania farm stand, he bit into one and asked what the variety was called, and she said Rambo. The apple honors Peter Gunnarson Rambo, a Swedish settler of the 1640s, and Morrell liked that the name had "the sound of force" and echoed the poet Rimbaud, whose A Season in Hell he had been reading. The apple is still grown; the name now belongs to the soldier.
The full story: Where does the name Rambo 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 names that were almost something else: a song called Starlight, an adventurer called Smith, and a soldier who was nearly nameless until somebody bit an apple.