🚨 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.
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Somewhere below, a loan is a dead pledge, an insult used to be a compliment, and an energy drink is a Thai ox.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is a bumblebee, chosen because its owner hums.
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BonusDUMBLEDORE
"Dumbledore" is an old English dialect word for a bumblebee, from a family of humming words that also gave "bumble" and "humble-bee"; it turns up in Thomas Hardy's rustics and in Charlotte Yonge's 1875 novel The Daisy Chain, and in some counties it meant the cockchafer instead. J. K. Rowling has said she chose it for the headmaster because he loves music and she imagined him wandering about humming to himself. Dumbledore is, by name, a bee in a beard.
1DUNGAREE
Hindi "dungri" was a coarse calico, named for a village that is now the Dongri quarter of Mumbai, where it was sold, and Dutch and English traders were buying "dongerijns" by the 1610s. The cloth, usually dyed blue, became the sailor's working fabric, and "dungarees," the trousers made from it, are recorded from 1868, a generation before denim overalls took over the job and, in American English, the name.
2UHURA
Nichelle Nichols walked into her Star Trek audition in 1966 carrying Robert Ruark's 1962 novel Uhuru, whose title is the Swahili for "freedom," and when the producers asked about it she suggested the word for her character. Gene Roddenberry had planned to call her Lieutenant Sulu, a name that went instead to George Takei's helmsman, and "Uhura" became the communications officer. The first name Nyota, Swahili for "star," came from a 1982 tie-in book and was not official until the 2009 film.
3MORTGAGE
Old French "mort gage" is a "dead pledge," and English had "morgage" by the late 1300s; the "t" was put back later to match the Latin. The great legal writer Edward Coke explained the deadness in the 1600s: if the borrower pays, the pledge is dead to the lender, since the land goes back; if he fails, the land is dead to him, since it is taken for good. Either way the pledge dies, which is more than most borrowers feel on the last payment. Modern French has abandoned "mortgage" for "hypothèque."
The full story: Where does the word "mortgage" come from? →4BOHEMIAN
French "bohémien" has meant a Roma traveler since the 1400s, on the mistaken belief that the Roma had come from Bohemia, the Central European kingdom they may have passed through on their way west. By 1834 Parisians were applying it to artists and writers who lived like wanderers, in garrets and on credit, and Henri Murger's stories of the Latin Quarter in the 1840s, later Puccini's La Bohème, made the type famous. Thackeray brought "bohemian" into English in Vanity Fair in 1848. The Roma never came from Bohemia, and the artists never went.
The full story: Where does the word "bohemian" come from? →5LUIGI
Mario got a brother for the 1983 arcade game Mario Bros., and the most repeated story is that his name came from a pizzeria, Mario & Luigi's, near Nintendo of America's offices in Washington state, though nobody has produced hard evidence. Shigeru Miyamoto, who named him, has also pointed to the Japanese word "ruiji," meaning "similar," since Luigi was designed as Mario with a palette swap. He has since grown taller, thinner and more nervous than his brother, and kept the name.
6EGREGIOUS
Latin "egregius" is "standing out from the flock," from "ex" and "grex," herd, and it meant distinguished, excellent, remarkable, which is what "egregious" meant when English took it in the 1530s. Within fifty years English speakers were using it ironically, an "egregious fool" being one who stood out from the flock in the wrong direction, and the irony ate the word. The admiring sense is dead, and only the flagrant one survives.
The full story: Where does the word "egregious" come from? →7DOLDRUMS
"Doldrums," for low spirits, is recorded by 1803 and is probably "dulled," in the old sense of made slow-witted, with an ending borrowed from "tantrums." Sailors applied it to a ship becalmed, unable to make headway, by 1824, and by 1848 the belt of calms and fitful winds near the equator, where sailing ships could sit for weeks, was "the doldrums," as if a mood had become a place on the chart. Meteorologists call the same belt the Intertropical Convergence Zone, which has never caught on.
8OMNIBUS
Latin "omnibus" is "for all," and the first vehicle so called ran in Nantes in 1826, when Stanislas Baudry, a retired colonel who had opened a bathhouse outside town, ran carriages into the city for his customers and found that people rode them without ever bathing. The story that the name came from a hatter named Omnès whose sign punned "Omnes Omnibus," everything for everyone, at the stop, has no contemporary evidence and comes in several incompatible versions. Baudry took the service to Paris in 1828, an English coachbuilder took it to London, and by 1835 Londoners had clipped "omnibus" to "bus," keeping the Latin dative ending and throwing the rest away.
9RED BULL
Krating Daeng is a sweet, uncarbonated tonic that Chaleo Yoovidhya launched in Thailand in 1976 and sold to truck drivers and laborers on night shifts; the name means "red gaur," the gaur being a huge wild ox of Southeast Asia. Dietrich Mateschitz, an Austrian marketing man for a toothpaste company, drank it on a trip to Bangkok in 1982 and found it cured his jet lag, went into partnership with Chaleo in 1984, and launched a carbonated, Westernized "Red Bull" in Austria on 1 April 1987. The ox on the can is the gaur, translated loosely.
The full story: How did Red Bull get its name? →10ENTHRALL
A thrall, from Old Norse "thraell," was a slave, often a war captive who had chosen servitude over death, and the status passed to his children; Old English had the word by the end of the Anglo-Saxon period. To "enthrall" someone is literally to make them a thrall, but the figurative sense, to hold someone in mental or moral bondage, to captivate, is recorded in the 1570s, and the literal sense only in the 1610s and rarely. English went straight to the metaphor.
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 words that flipped: a compliment that became an insult, a blonde that became a redhead yesterday, and a pledge that is dead whichever way the loan goes.