🚨 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 Hungarian village is coaching your football team's rival, a steam-engine salesman invented a unit by timing brewery horses, and a word for "layman" turned into a word for "dirty."
⌄ ⌄ ⌄
Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is a band that was named, without its knowledge, after a dead farmer.
⌄ ⌄ ⌄
One more beat.
⌄ ⌄ ⌄ last chance ⌄ ⌄ ⌄
BonusJETHRO TULL
In early 1968 Ian Anderson's band was changing its name every few weeks, through Navy Blue, Ian Henderson's Bag o' Nails and Candy Coloured Rain, and a booking agent in their management office supplied the next one, which Anderson accepted partly to show he was taking advice. He did not know who Jethro Tull was. The real one, who died in 1741, was a Berkshire farmer who invented the horse-drawn seed drill and helped start the agricultural revolution, and by the time Anderson found out, "rather embarrassed to realize we were named after a dead guy who invented the seed drill," the band had a residency at the Marquee Club under the name and could not change it again. He has since called it identity theft.
1JACUZZI
Seven Jacuzzi brothers, immigrants from Friuli, started a machine shop in Berkeley in 1915 and made laminated wooden propellers for First World War aircraft, then, after a plane crash killed one of them in 1921, turned to agricultural water pumps. In 1948 Candido Jacuzzi built a pump that could be dropped into a bathtub to give his son Ken, who had rheumatoid arthritis, the hydrotherapy he was getting at the hospital, and the company sold it from 1955 as a medical aid. In 1968 a third-generation Roy Jacuzzi built the jets into the tub itself and sold it for pleasure, and "Jacuzzi" became the word for every hot tub, which the company still politely objects to.
The full story: How did Jacuzzi get its name? →2ESQUIRE
Latin "scutarius" is a shield-bearer, from "scutum," shield, and through Anglo-Norman "esquier" it named the young man who carried a knight's shield and hoped to become one. English records use "esquire" as a formal rank just below knight from 1374, and over the next centuries it drifted down to cover any landed gentleman, then any gentleman at all. In America it survives almost only as the "Esq." that lawyers put after their names, a title with no legal meaning that anyone may use and almost no one else does.
3TOBOGGAN
The Mi'kmaq and Maliseet of the Canadian Maritimes hauled loads over snow on a long, flat sled of thin birch, curled up at the front, and French Canadians took their word for it as "tabagane." English borrowed "toboggan" in 1829 for the sled, made it a verb by 1846, and in the American South, by 1929, transferred it to the knitted cap you wear while riding one, which still confuses visitors from the North.
4HORSEPOWER
James Watt wanted to sell his rotative steam engine to London brewers, whose mills were turned by horses, so in the 1780s he put the engine's output in their terms. He timed a brewery horse walking a 24-foot circle, estimated that it pulled with 180 pounds of force, worked out about 32,500 foot-pounds a minute, and rounded up to 33,000. That was one "horsepower," a generous figure that a real horse cannot sustain all day, which suited a salesman whose engine could. Whitbread bought one and nearly doubled its output. The unit outlived the horse, the brewery and the engine.
5RHIANNON
In 1974 Stevie Nicks picked up a paperback called Triad, by Mary Leader, about a woman possessed by a spirit named Rhiannon, liked the name, and wrote a song around it at the piano before she had joined Fleetwood Mac. Only afterward did she learn that Rhiannon was a figure from the Mabinogion, the medieval Welsh tales: a woman from the otherworld who rides a horse no one can catch and is attended by birds whose song can wake the dead. The song came out in 1975, and Nicks has been living with the coincidence ever since.
6OSMOSIS
The French physiologist Henri Dutrochet, studying how water crosses the membranes of plant cells in the 1820s, called the inward flow "endosmose" and the outward flow "exosmose," from Greek "osmos," a push. The Scottish chemist Thomas Graham dropped the prefixes to "osmose" in 1854, and the Latinized "osmosis" appears in 1867. By 1900 it had its figurative sense, absorbing knowledge without visible effort, which is how most people now use a word that began with sap.
7TURKEY
In the 1540s English merchants were importing guinea fowl through Ottoman territory and calling them turkey-cocks, after the vague region they came through. When the much larger bird the Spanish had brought home from Mexico in the 1520s reached English tables, people assumed it was the same sort of thing and gave it the same name, and the guinea fowl lost it. Everyone else was equally confused: the French call the bird "dinde," from "poule d'Inde," chicken of India, and in Turkish it is "hindi," Indian, because the Americas were still thought to be the Indies. The turkey was a Christmas dinner in England by 1573, under a name from the wrong continent.
8UMLAUT
The poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock coined "Umlaut," literally "sound-change," in 1774, and in 1819 Jacob Grimm, of the fairy tales, gave it the technical meaning it has kept: the shift of a vowel under the influence of a vowel in the next syllable, the process that turns German "Mann" into "Männer" and English "man" into "men." English philologists borrowed "umlaut" in 1852, and the word drifted from the sound change to the two dots that mark it, which is what most people now mean by it, including the heavy-metal bands that use them for decoration.
9LEGEND
Medieval Latin "legenda" is "things to be read," and the things were the lives of the saints, read aloud in church on each saint's feast day and in the refectories of monasteries at meals. The most famous collection, the 13th-century Golden Legend, was full of miracles, and by the late 1300s "legend" in English meant any marvelous story whether or not it was true. The inscription on a coin took the word in the 1610s, the key on a map only in 1903, and "a legend in his own time" is a phrase of 1958.
10LEWD
Old English "læwede" meant lay, not in holy orders, and since in those days the clergy were the people who could read, by the 1200s "lewd" meant unlettered, and was paired in verse with "learned" as its opposite. From ignorant it slid to low, from low to wicked, and by the late 1300s to coarse and lustful, where it has stayed. The whole journey is a clerical judgment on everyone who was not a cleric.
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 were handed to someone who did not ask: a band named after a farmer, a goddess handed to a songwriter by a paperback, and a snub that laymen have been wearing for seven hundred years.