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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 spy is named after the sun, a quack remedy means "ours," and a hair color has changed from blonde to red without anyone dyeing it.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is Greek for "small islands," and the man usually credited with it was beaten to it by a year.
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BonusMICRONESIA
In 1832 the French explorer Jules Dumont d'Urville presented a paper to the Geographical Society of Paris dividing the peoples of the Pacific into three: Polynesia, the many islands; Melanesia, the black islands; and "Micronesia," from Greek "mikros," small, and "nesos," island, for the scatter of tiny atolls north of the equator. His countryman Grégoire Louis Domeny de Rienzi had used the word a year earlier, but d'Urville's scheme is the one that stuck, and it has been in every atlas since. Anthropologists now regard the threefold division as a superficial reading of the Pacific, and only Polynesia as a category that holds up; Micronesia, they say, is a disparate ensemble with no single language, culture or geology. The name remains.
1MATA HARI
Margaretha Zelle, a Dutch officer's wife, spent the 1890s in the Dutch East Indies and wrote to friends there that she had taken a new name: "Mata Hari," Malay for "eye of the day," the sun. Back in Europe, divorced and broke, she debuted under it as an exotic dancer at the Musée Guimet in Paris on 13 March 1905, posing as a Javanese princess trained in temple rites, and became famous overnight. She was shot by the French as a German spy in 1917, and the evidence against her has looked thinner with every decade.
The full story: The origin of the name Mata Hari →2INK
Greek "enkauston" is "burned in," and Late Latin "encaustum" was the purple-red ink, made from shellfish and fixed by heat, with which Roman and then Byzantine emperors signed their decrees; Justinian's code made manufacturing it for anyone else a capital offense. The word passed through Old French "enque" into English "ink" by the mid-1200s, by which time it meant any writing fluid at all. The Romans themselves usually called ordinary ink "atramentum," blackening; the emperors' word won.
3CARAT
Greek "keration" is "little horn," the name of the carob seed, which was so uniform in weight that traders in the ancient Mediterranean used it as a standard for weighing gold and gems. The unit passed through Arabic "qirat" and Italian "carato" into English in the late 1400s as a measure of gold fineness, one twenty-fourth part, and by the 1570s as the weight of a precious stone. The "carat" was standardized at 200 milligrams only in 1907; before that every market's carob seeds weighed slightly differently.
4RHETORIC
Greek "rhetor" is a public speaker, and "rhetorike techne" the speaker's art, which the Athenians taught as a profession and Aristotle systematized in a treatise still assigned in classrooms. English took "rhetoric" through French and Latin in the early 1300s, when it was one of the three arts of the trivium, with grammar and logic. The dismissive sense, mere words as opposed to action, is as old as the admiring one.
5ORDEAL
Old English "ordal" is a judgment, that which is dealt out, cognate with German "Urteil," a legal verdict. The judgment in question was God's: the accused carried a red-hot iron, or walked blindfold between glowing plowshares, or was bound and thrown into water, and the wound or the sinking showed guilt. England abolished trial by ordeal in the reign of Henry III, after the Church withdrew its priests from the ceremonies in 1215, and the word nearly died with it; it was reborrowed in the 1500s and acquired its modern sense, any severe trial, in the 1650s.
6NOSTRUM
Latin "nostrum" is "ours," the neuter of "noster," and a "nostrum remedium" was "our remedy," the formula peddled by a seller who claimed the secret recipe as his own invention. English had "nostrum" around 1600 for a medicine of secret ingredients, which usually meant a quack one, and by 1749 it also meant a pet scheme for solving any problem, which is where politicians' nostrums come from. The word is a boast that became an insult.
7EXAM
Latin "examen" was the tongue of a balance, the pointer that shows when two pans weigh the same, and "examinare" was to weigh, then to test or consider. English "examine" meant to question someone about their knowledge or competence around 1300, and to question a witness in court by the early 1400s; "examination" followed, and "exam" is Victorian student slang for it. Every exam is, by name, a weighing.
8SMURF
The Belgian cartoonist Peyo was at dinner with his colleague André Franquin when he could not remember the word for salt and asked him to pass the "schtroumpf," and Franquin replied in kind: here is the schtroumpf, and when you have finished schtroumpfing it, schtroumpf it back. The two spent the weekend speaking schtroumpf, and when Peyo needed a name for the small blue creatures who appeared in a Johan and Pirlouit story in 1958, he had one. "Smurf" is the Dutch translation, which English adopted; the French word happens to sound like the German for "sock."
The full story: Where does the name Smurf come from? →9ICHABOD
In the First Book of Samuel, the wife of the priest Phinehas goes into labor on hearing that the Philistines have captured the Ark of the Covenant and killed her husband and father-in-law, and with her dying breath names the boy "I-chabod," "no glory," because the glory has departed from Israel. Washington Irving gave the name to the lanky, credulous schoolmaster of Sleepy Hollow in 1820, and "Ichabod" Crane has carried the Bible's gloomiest name into every Halloween since.
10AUBURN
Medieval Latin "alburnus" is "off-white," from "albus," white, and when English took "auburn" from Old French in the early 1400s it meant pale yellowish-white, the color of flax. In the 1500s the word's spelling and sense drifted under the pull of "brun," brown, and "auburn" came out the other side meaning reddish-brown, the opposite of where it started. A medieval auburn-haired woman was a blonde.
That's today's set. Come back tomorrow for another ten, and if there's a thread running under this batch, it's measurement: a seed that weighed gold, a balance that gives exams their name, and a Greek word for islands that measured a whole ocean badly.