π¨ MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING π¨
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, an admiral's cloak is in your hangover, a Swedish punishment is in your glove, and the worst villain in Dickens is named after the kindest boy he ever met.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is an architect who called his lawyers.
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BonusGOLDFINGER
ErnΕ Goldfinger was a Hungarian-born modernist architect who demolished a row of cottages in Hampstead in the 1930s to build his own house at 2 Willow Road, which Ian Fleming, among others, objected to. Years later, after a conversation on a golf course with the architect's cousin, Fleming gave the name to the gold-obsessed villain of his 1959 novel. Goldfinger consulted his lawyers; Fleming offered to rename the character "Goldprick" and let the reader guess why. The publisher paid Goldfinger's costs and sent him six free copies, and "Goldfinger" stayed. The house is now a National Trust property; the villain is on a thousand posters.
1GROGGY
In August 1740 Admiral Edward Vernon ordered that his sailors' daily rum be diluted with water, and the sailors, who called him "Old Grog" for the cloak of coarse grogram he wore on deck, gave the watered drink his nickname. "Groggy" meant drunk on it by 1770, and by 1832 prizefighters were using it for a man still on his feet but no longer sure where they were. Vernon's name also sits on George Washington's house: Washington's half-brother served under him and named Mount Vernon in his honor.
The full story: Where does the word "groggy" come from? →2OUTBACK
Australians in the 1870s spoke of being "out back," two adverbs, meaning away in the back settlements beyond the coast; the phrase is recorded from 1878. By 1907 it had fused into a single noun, "the outback," for the whole remote interior, and the two little English words have become one of the most Australian in the language.
3LUNATIC
Late Latin "lunaticus" is moon-struck, from "luna," on the ancient belief that madness waxed and waned with the moon. English had "lunatic" by the late 1200s, and Old English had already said "monseoc," moon-sick. It became a legal term for a person of unsound mind and stayed on the statute books into the 20th century. Theodore Roosevelt coined "lunatic fringe" in his 1913 autobiography for the extremists at the edge of every reform movement.
The full story: Where does the word "lunatic" come from? →4DISMAL
Medieval calendars marked two days in each month as "dies mali," the evil days, also called Egyptian days because the calculations were supposed to go back to Egyptian astrologers, on which nothing should be begun. Anglo-French ran the phrase together as "dismal," and around 1400 English spoke of a "dismal day," an unlucky one. By the 1580s "dismal" had broadened to anything gloomy, and in 1849 Thomas Carlyle called economics "the dismal science," which it has never lived down.
The full story: Where does the word "dismal" come from? →5FAGIN
When Charles Dickens was twelve and his father was in debtors' prison, he was sent to work at Warren's blacking warehouse, pasting labels on pots of boot polish. An older boy named Bob Fagin showed him how to tie the string and stood up for him when the others teased, and Dickens remembered him as having been "very good to me." Years later, needing a name for the master of a gang of child thieves, he took Bob's surname, and admitted it in an autobiographical fragment without ever explaining why. Fagin is the one character in Oliver Twist named after a kindness.
6INFANT
Latin "infans" is "not speaking," from "in-" and "fari," to speak, and meant a child too young to talk, though the Romans stretched it to older children and English once used it for any child up to about seven. The word reached English in the late 1300s. Italian used the same root for "infanteria," the foot soldiers who were too young or too poor to ride with the cavalry, which is why an army's "infantry" is, by name, a body of children.
7NAUGHTY
Middle English "noughti" meant having nought, nothing, needy, when it appeared in the late 1300s, and from poor it slid, as such words do, to worthless and then to wicked; by the mid-1500s a "naughty pack" was a person of bad character, and the word was serious. The softening to a child's mischief came in the 1630s, and the knowing adult sense in 1869. "Naughty" has gone from destitution to a wink in six hundred years.
The full story: Where does the word "naughty" come from? →8GAUNTLET
Swedish soldiers in the 1600s called the punishment of running between two rows of comrades who struck at you a "gatlopp," a lane-run, and English borrowed it as "gantlope." Within a few generations English speakers, who had no idea what a gatlopp was, reshaped the word into one they knew, the armored glove, and by 1800 you ran "the gauntlet." The glove you throw down and the lane you run have nothing to do with each other, and only one of them is a gauntlet by right.
9ELPHABA
L. Frank Baum never gave the Wicked Witch of the West a name. When Gregory Maguire wrote her life story in Wicked in 1995, he built one from Baum's initials, L. F. B., sounded out: Elphaba. The 2003 musical made it one of the best-known invented names of the century, and most of the audience has no idea they are singing an acronym.
10RAPUNZEL
German "Rapunzel" is rampion, or possibly corn salad, a plant grown for its leaves and roots, and in the Grimms' 1812 tale it is what the pregnant mother craves from the garden over the wall, for which the enchantress exacts the child. The Grimms took the name from Friedrich Schulz's 1790 German version. That was a translation of a 1698 French tale, Persinette, where the plant and the girl were parsley, which was itself based on an Italian Petrosinella, also parsley. Rapunzel is a salad green in three languages, and the hair came later.
The full story: Where does the name Rapunzel 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 borrowed names that nobody consented to: an architect, a kind boy at a boot-polish factory, and a children's author turned into a witch.