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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 family tree is a bird's footprint, a Beatles classic spent months as a breakfast, and a national mascot turns out to be older than the man he is named for.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is a failed substitute for tires that was sold in an Easter egg.
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One more beat.
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BonusSILLY PUTTY
When Japan cut off the Allies' rubber supply in 1942, chemists went looking for a synthetic, and two of them, Earl Warrick at Dow Corning and James Wright at General Electric, each mixed silicone oil with boric acid and got the same useless result: a putty that bounced, stretched, shattered when struck, and could not be made into a tire. It circulated as a party trick for years until a toy-shop owner, Ruth Fallgatter, sold it as "bouncing putty," and when she dropped it, an advertising consultant named Peter Hodgson borrowed money, bought a batch from the GE lab, renamed it "Silly Putty," and packed one-ounce lumps into plastic eggs for Easter 1950. A New Yorker item that August made it a craze. The failure outsold most of the successes.
The full story: How did Silly Putty get its name? →1SIDEWINDER
William McLean's team at the Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake, California, spent the early 1950s building a missile that would home on the heat of a jet's exhaust, and named it for the horned rattlesnake of the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, which hunts the same way, sensing the warmth of its prey through pits in its face and moving across the sand in a looping, sideways motion that the missile's corkscrewing flight resembled. The Sidewinder first scored in combat over the Taiwan Strait in 1958 and is still in service, the snake's name on a weapon for seventy years.
2INOCULATE
Latin "oculus" is an eye, and a gardener's "eye" is a bud, so "inoculare" meant to set a bud of one plant into the bark of another, and that is what "inoculate" meant when it reached English in the 1400s: grafting. In the early 1700s, when the practice of scratching a little smallpox matter into a healthy arm arrived from the Ottoman lands, championed in England by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the gardeners' word was borrowed for it, since a bit of one body was being planted in another. Every vaccine since has been, by name, a graft.
3LAYLA
Eric Clapton's friend Ian Dallas, who was converting to Islam, gave him a copy of Layla and Majnun, the 12th-century Persian poet Nizami's romance about a young man who falls so hopelessly in love that he goes mad and is forbidden to marry her. Clapton, who was then hopelessly in love with Pattie Boyd, the wife of his friend George Harrison, took the heroine's name for the song he recorded with Derek and the Dominos in 1970. "Layla" means "night" in Arabic, and the poem's lovers are buried together, which the song does not mention.
4LOTTERY
The word comes from Italian "lotteria," a drawing of lots, from "lotto," a share or portion, and the thing itself reached England in 1567, when Elizabeth I announced a draw to pay for harbors and ships without raising taxes. Four hundred thousand tickets at ten shillings each were offered, with a first prize of five thousand pounds in cash and plate, and every ticket holder got temporary immunity from arrest for anything short of felony, piracy or treason. Sales were so slow that the draw, outside the old St Paul's Cathedral, was put off until January 1569, when a blindfolded child pulled tickets day and night for nearly four months. It was the first state lottery in English history, and most of the tickets went unsold.
The full story: Where does the word "lottery" come from? →5YESTERDAY
Paul McCartney woke up one morning in his room at the Asher family house on Wimpole Street with a complete melody in his head, went to the piano beside the bed, and spent weeks playing it to friends in the music business, asking whether they recognized it, because he could not believe he had written it. While he waited for words he sang it as "Scrambled Eggs," with a lyric about how much he loved them, and the placeholder lasted into the summer of 1965, when he settled on "Yesterday" on a holiday in Portugal. He recorded it alone with a string quartet that June; the other Beatles declined to play on it.
6PEDIGREE
The clerks who drew up medieval genealogies marked descent with a small forked sign, like a bird's footprint, and in Anglo-French that mark was a "pe de gru," a crane's foot, which is what it looks like. By the early 1400s "pedigree" meant the whole chart, by the mid-1400s the line of ancestry it showed, and by 1600 breeders were using it for horses and dogs. The French themselves never used the phrase for a family tree; modern French borrowed "pédigree" back from English.
7UNCLE SAM
The official story, endorsed by Congress in 1961, is that Samuel Wilson, a meatpacker in Troy, New York, supplied the army with beef in the War of 1812 in barrels stamped "E.A.-U.S." for the contractor and the government, and that his workers joked the initials stood for "Uncle Sam" Wilson, a joke the soldiers carried off to camp. Wilson was real, the barrels were real, and the Troy newspaper did use the name in 1813, without mentioning him. But a midshipman's diary uses "Uncle Sam" for the government in 1810, two years before the war, which suggests the nickname was already around and Wilson simply fit it. Thomas Nast gave the character his striped trousers in the 1870s.
The full story: Where does the name Uncle Sam come from? →8TRIAGE
French "trier" is to pick or sort, and "triage" entered English in the early 1700s as the sorting of goods by quality, and in the coffee trade, by 1895, "triage" was the name of the lowest grade of beans, the broken ones picked out and sold cheap. French military surgeons in the First World War ran "salles de triage," sorting wards, where the wounded were divided into the lightly hurt and the gravely hurt, and American doctors brought the word home with that meaning. The coffee sense is forgotten; the hospital sense is the only one left.
9TUNGSTEN
Swedish "tung sten" is "heavy stone," the miners' name for a dense white ore, and in 1781 Carl Wilhelm Scheele extracted a new acid from it and gave the acid the ore's name. Two years later the Spanish Elhuyar brothers reduced the same oxide to a metal from a different ore, wolframite, and German and Scandinavian chemists called the metal wolfram after that source. The Swedes, whose language supplied "tungsten," now call it volfram, the English call it tungsten, and the symbol W, chosen by Berzelius from the Latin "wolframium," records the name that English does not use.
The full story: How did tungsten get its name? →10YODEL
German "jodeln" is to sing out the syllable "jo," and the Alpine style of flipping between chest voice and falsetto was called that by the 1700s. The first English mention anyone has found is in the diary of an Irishwoman, Martha Wilmot, who heard "the wild yodling of two young girls" in the Alps on 18 August 1827; a countess wrote home from Bern in 1838 of girls "youdling to perfection in parts," and the spelling settled down to "yodel" from there.
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 outran the facts: a nickname older than the man it honors, a prize draw nobody bought into, and a putty that could not be a tire and did not need to be.