🚨 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 rock star is a hearing-aid shop, a garden shed is a Latin joke, and a pink video game hero is a lawyer from New York.
⌄ ⌄ ⌄
Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word used to have a third word in front, and it was the name of an oven.
⌄ ⌄ ⌄
One more beat.
⌄ ⌄ ⌄ last chance ⌄ ⌄ ⌄
BonusBURGER KING
Keith Kramer and Matthew Burns opened Insta-Burger King in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1953, naming it for the Insta-Broiler, a conveyor oven they had licensed that cooked a dozen patties at once in view of the customers. James McLamore and David Edgerton, who opened the Miami restaurants in 1954, found the Insta-Broilers broke down under heavy use, so Edgerton and a mechanic built a gas flame broiler in three weeks and threw the ovens out. With the Insta-Broiler gone the "Insta" made no sense, and when McLamore and Edgerton bought the struggling founders out in 1959 the chain became Burger King. The flame broiler is still the pitch; the oven that named the company is forgotten.
The full story: How did Burger King get its name? →1BONO
Paul Hewson belonged as a teenager to a Dublin street gang called Lypton Village, whose members gave each other surreal nicknames, and his friend Gavin Friday dubbed him "Bono Vox of O'Connell Street," after a hearing-aid shop called Bonavox near where they grew up. Hewson disliked it until someone told him the Latin meant "good voice," which for a singer was hard to turn down, and he shortened it to "Bono." The shop sold hearing aids; the name went on to sell a great many records.
2ULTIMATUM
Medieval Latin "ultimatum" is "a final thing," the neuter of "ultimatus," last, and diplomats took it up in 1731 for the last set of terms offered before war. English slang of the 1820s, with its usual respect for Latin, used "ultimatum" for the buttocks, the last part of a person. The diplomatic sense has outlasted the joke.
The full story: Where does the word "ultimatum" come from? →3RADICAL
Latin "radix" is a root, and "radical" in the 1300s meant going to the root of something, as in the "radical moisture" that medieval doctors thought kept the body alive. "Radical reform," reform from the roots up, was a phrase in British politics from 1786, and by 1802 a Radical was a person who wanted it, the extreme wing of what became the Liberal Party. The mathematicians' radical sign, for extracting a root, is a modified letter r, and the 1980s surfers' "rad" is the same root again.
4GAZEBO
The word first appears in 1752, in a book of garden designs, and the best guess at its origin is that it is a joke: English "gaze" given the Latin first-person future ending "-bo," as in "videbo," I shall see, so that a "gazebo" is "I shall gaze." It was modeled on "belvedere," the Italian for "fair view," the name for a lookout turret on a grand house. The Oxford English Dictionary allows that it might instead be a garbled Asian word, but nobody has found one.
5EEYORE
A donkey says "hee-haw," and if you say "hee-haw" in the southern English accent of A. A. Milne, with the r's silent, and write it down, you get "Eeyore." The gloomy donkey appeared in Winnie-the-Pooh in 1926, modeled on a stuffed toy from Harrods that Christopher Robin Milne had been given for Christmas, whose neck had gone floppy, which is where the drooping head came from. Americans, who pronounce their r's, have been saying his name wrong for a century.
6RANCH
Spanish "rancho" was a mess room, from "ranchear," to lodge or station, and meant a group of people who ate together, then a group who lived and worked together, then the huts they lived in. In the American Southwest it meant a small farm, and English took "ranch" in 1808 for a country house and by 1847 for the large stock farms of the West. The ranch-style house dates from 1947, and ranch dressing from 1970, when a mix sold by mail from a real Hidden Valley Ranch in California went national.
7KIRBY
In 1984 Universal Studios sued Nintendo, claiming Donkey Kong infringed on King Kong, and a New York lawyer named John Kirby defended the company by showing that Universal had itself argued in an earlier case that King Kong was in the public domain. Nintendo won, gave Kirby a sailboat named Donkey Kong, and, according to Shigeru Miyamoto, named the pink hero Masahiro Sakurai created in 1992 after him. Sakurai has said he does not remember how the name was chosen, so Kirby the lawyer has the only story on record.
8IOTA
Iota is the ninth letter of the Greek alphabet and the smallest, a single stroke, and the Greeks already used it proverbially for anything tiny. The sense passed into English through Matthew 5:18, where not "one jot or one tittle" of the law shall pass away, "jot" being the older English form of the same letter; "iota" for a very small amount is recorded from the 1630s. The letter is the smallest thing you can write, which is why it means the smallest thing you can mean.
9NEIGHBOR
Old English "neahgebur" is "near dweller," from "neah," nigh, and "gebur," a dweller or farmer, the same word that survives in Dutch "boer" and the Boers of South Africa. The compound is common to the Germanic languages, Dutch "nabuur" and German "Nachbar" among them, and "neighbor" has meant the same thing for more than a thousand years, which is rare for any word. The peasant in the second half has been politely forgotten.
10GRAFFITI
Italian "graffito" is a scribble, a diminutive of "graffio," a scratch, from the Greek "graphein," which meant to scratch before it meant to write, since the earliest writing was scratched into clay. Archaeologists excavating Pompeii adopted "graffiti" in 1851 for the ancient scrawls on its walls, election slogans, insults and declarations of love, and by 1877 the word covered fresh scrawls in modern streets. The Romans were enthusiastic practitioners, which is why the word is Italian.
The full story: Where does the word "graffiti" come from? →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 were handed over in thanks or in jest: a lawyer's surname on a pink hero, a hearing-aid shop on a singer, and a Latin pun on a garden shed.