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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 gallop is named for a cathedral, a submarine captain is named for nobody, and a Japanese love song is named for a hotpot it never mentions.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word was invented by two brothers who ended up suing each other over it.
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BonusCORN FLAKES
John Harvey Kellogg ran the Seventh-day Adventist sanitarium at Battle Creek, Michigan, on a bland, meatless diet, and he, his wife Ella and his younger brother Will spent the 1890s trying to make it palatable. In 1894 they produced the first flaked cereal, from wheat, by their own account after a batch of boiled grain was left standing and went through the rollers anyway; corn followed in 1898. Will bought the rights and founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company in 1906, advertised relentlessly and put sugar in the recipe, which his brother the doctor considered a betrayal. John Harvey sued for the family name and lost in 1911, and the brothers barely spoke again. "Corn flakes" were the plainest food in America, sold by the most elaborate feud.
The full story: How did Corn Flakes get their name? →1CANTER
Pilgrims riding to Thomas Becket's shrine at Canterbury went at an easy pace, not wanting to arrive before their companions or tire the horse, and by the 1630s "Canterbury pace" was the name for that gait, halfway between a trot and a gallop. "To Canterbury" was a verb by the 1670s, and in 1706 it was clipped to "canter," the noun following in 1755. Chaucer's pilgrims, in other words, were cantering, and gave the word to every riding school since.
2OKRA
The pod came to the Americas with enslaved West Africans, and so did both of its names. "Okra," recorded in English in the 1670s, is from a West African language, a cousin of the Akan "nkruma," and "gumbo," the Louisiana name for the plant and the stew made from it, is from a Bantu word, "ki ngombo." Few English vegetables carry two African names at once.
3RECORD
Latin "recordari" is to call to mind, built on "cor," the heart, because the Romans took the heart to be where memory lived, which is also why we learn things "by heart." When "record" reached English around 1200 it meant to recite or to get by heart, and only in the 1300s did it come to mean writing a thing down so it would not be forgotten. Edison's wax cylinders took the noun in 1878, and the heart has been inside every record store since.
4NEMO
Jules Verne's captain of the Nautilus, in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas in 1870, calls himself Nemo, Latin for "no one," the same trick Odysseus played on the Cyclops when he gave his name as Nobody. Verne kept the captain's identity secret until The Mysterious Island in 1875, where he is revealed as Prince Dakkar, an Indian noble who built his submarine after the British put down the 1857 rebellion. Pixar gave the name to a clownfish in 2003, and most people now think it belongs to the fish.
5FANATIC
Latin "fanum" is a temple, and "fanaticus" meant belonging to a temple, then inspired or possessed by the god of one, then simply mad. English took "fanatic" in the 1520s in the sense of a lunatic, and in the 1640s, during the Civil War, applied it to the religious zealots on the far side of whatever argument was going. In 1889 American sportswriters clipped it to "fan" for the people who turned up to every baseball game, and the temple has been in the bleachers ever since.
6LIBRARY
Latin "liber" meant the inner bark of a tree before it meant a book, because bark was, by tradition, what the earliest Romans wrote on, and "librarium" was a bookcase or a bookseller's. English took "library" in the late 1300s for a room of books, while the Romance languages kept the commercial sense: a "librairie" in French and a "libreria" in Italian is a bookshop, and the place where you borrow is a "bibliothèque." The bark is still in the word.
7ALBATROSS
Portuguese and Spanish sailors called the pelican "alcatraz," possibly from an Arabic word for a sea eagle, and English sailors in the 1670s borrowed it for the great wandering seabird of the southern oceans, reshaping it under the influence of Latin "albus," white, since the bird is. The same word named the rock in San Francisco Bay where pelicans roosted, before the prison. The "albatross" around one's neck is from Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner in 1798, in which a sailor who shoots one is made to wear the corpse, though the burden sense is not recorded until 1936.
8KINDERGARTEN
Friedrich Fröbel opened a "play and activity institute" for small children at Bad Blankenburg in Thuringia in 1837, and on June 28, 1840, renamed it "Kindergarten," a garden of children, on the theory that the young should be tended like plants rather than drilled like recruits. Margarethe Schurz, a Fröbel pupil and the wife of the future senator Carl Schurz, opened the first American one in her home in Watertown, Wisconsin, in 1856, conducted in German; Elizabeth Peabody's in Boston in 1860 was the first in English. The German word was never translated, and American five-year-olds still go to a garden.
The full story: Where does the word "kindergarten" come from? →9ENGLAND
The Angles were one of the Germanic peoples who crossed the North Sea to Britain in the 400s, and Old English "Engla land" was simply their territory, as against the Saxons' and the Jutes'. Their home district on the Baltic coast of what is now Denmark is said to have been shaped like a fishhook, which is the usual explanation for both the tribe's name and the English word "angle," though the etymologists hedge. Canute, a Dane, was the first ruler to style himself king of England, and by the 1300s the name had spread over territory the Angles never saw.
10SUKIYAKI
Kyu Sakamoto's 1961 hit "Ue o Muite Arukō," "I Look Up When I Walk," is about a man who walks with his face turned up so that his tears will not fall. Louis Benjamin, head of Pye Records in London, heard it on a trip to Japan, decided no British disc jockey could pronounce the title, and released it under the name of a Japanese beef hotpot that British listeners might at least recognize, which has nothing to do with the song. Kenny Ball's instrumental version reached the British top ten in early 1963, a disc jockey in Pasco, Washington, started playing Sakamoto's original, and "Sukiyaki" spent three weeks at number one in America that June, the only Japanese-language song ever to do so, under the name of a dinner.
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 names that got attached by someone else: a breakfast named by a feuding brother, a love song named after dinner, and a captain who chose to be nobody.