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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 philosopher is a wrestling nickname, a battle cry is on your bedside table, and a village of fools became the home of Batman.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is a railway station, and the bear was a Christmas present for the author's wife.
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BonusPADDINGTON
On Christmas Eve 1956 Michael Bond, a BBC cameraman, noticed a single teddy bear left on a shelf in a London shop, thought it looked forlorn, and bought it for his wife. They lived near Paddington station, so the bear got the station's name, and Bond wrote the first book about him in about ten days; A Bear Called Paddington came out in October 1958. Bond said later that the bear owed something to the wartime newsreels of evacuee children at London stations, each with a label round the neck and a small suitcase, and that "in a sense, Paddington was a refugee." The station itself is named for the district, which is said to have been the farmstead of a Saxon called Padda.
1PLATO
Diogenes Laertius, writing centuries later, says the philosopher was born Aristocles, after his grandfather, and that his wrestling coach nicknamed him Platon, "broad," for his build, or his forehead, or the breadth of his style, depending on which version you read. Modern scholars are skeptical, since Plato was a perfectly ordinary Athenian name, but the story has been told for two thousand years and shows no sign of stopping. Either way, the founder of the Academy may be remembered by a gym nickname.
2ALARM
Italian soldiers shouted "all'arme!", to arms, and the cry ran together into a single word, which Old French passed to English by the late 1300s as a call to defend against an attack. By the 1500s "alarm" meant any sound that warned of danger and the device that made it, and in the 1690s English had "a larum clock," the device that warns you of morning. Every phone alarm is, by descent, a medieval sergeant shouting.
3DISASTER
Italian "disastro" is literally "ill-starred," a calamity caused by a bad position of the planets, from the same astrology that gave English "ill-starred" itself. French took it in the 1560s and English in the 1590s, when Shakespeare could still use "disaster" with the stars in mind. Before that, English called a national calamity a "land-sorrow," which is a word worth bringing back.
The full story: Where does the word "disaster" come from? →4DANDELION
Medieval Latin herbals called the plant "dens leonis," lion's tooth, for the jagged leaves, and French turned that into "dent de lion," which English wore down to "dandelion" by the late 1300s. English has had other names for it: "tell-time," because children blew the seed heads to tell the hour, and "piss-a-bed," which the French share as "pissenlit," for the plant's well-known effect on the bladder. The lion won.
5IGOR
There is no assistant of any name in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The hunchbacked helper was Fritz, added by an 1823 stage version and played by Dwight Frye in the 1931 film. Ygor, played by Bela Lugosi in Son of Frankenstein (1939) and The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), was a blacksmith with a broken neck who was neither a hunchback nor anyone's assistant. Popular memory fused the two, and Marty Feldman's crazy-eyed "Igor" in Young Frankenstein (1974) fixed the composite so firmly that most people now believe he was in the book.
6NOVEL
Italian "novella" was a "new little story," one of the short tales in a collection like Boccaccio's Decameron, and that is what "novel" meant when English took it in the 1560s. By the 1630s English had transferred the word to the long prose narrative that had been called a romance, and the short form had to be re-borrowed as "novella." The newest thing in literature is named for its newness, four hundred years on.
7GOTHAM
A village called Gotham was proverbial in England from the 1400s for the foolishness of its inhabitants, the Wise Men of Gotham, who in one tale tried to drown an eel and in another built a fence around a cuckoo to keep spring from leaving. Washington Irving, mocking the manners and politics of New York in his satirical magazine Salmagundi in 1807, called the city "Gotham" and its people Gothamites, and the joke outlived the insult. Batman's writers borrowed the name for their city in 1940, and most readers never knew it meant a town of fools.
The full story: How did Gotham get its name? →8TAXI
A German engineer's "Taxameter" of 1890, from Medieval Latin "taxa," a charge, recorded the distance and fare of a cab ride, and London fitted the devices to its new motor cabs in March 1907. "Taximeter cab" was too long, and within the year it was "taxi." Pilots borrowed the word in 1911 for an aircraft moving slowly along the ground, either because early planes were slangily called taxis or because a taxiing aircraft looks like a cab cruising for a fare.
9ORIENT
Latin "oriens" is the rising sun and the east where it rises, and English had "the Orient" for the eastern lands by the 1300s. The verb came in the 1700s from church building: to "orient" a church was to lay it out with the altar at the east end, facing the sunrise, as Christian practice had required since the third century. From there it spread to aligning anything, then to finding your own bearings, so that "orientation" is, at root, facing the dawn.
10NAIVE
Latin "nativus" meant born, innate, natural, and gave English "native." Old French wore it down to "naïf," meaning natural and genuine, and also just born, and so innocent and foolish. English took the feminine form "naive" in the 1650s for someone artless, and has kept the French spelling, including the two dots that nobody is sure whether to type.
The full story: Where does the word "naive" 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 things named for what they look like: a broad-shouldered philosopher, a jagged leaf, and a bear that looked like it needed a home.