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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 war cry sells soap, a bonus strikes up a tune, and a video-game heroine is renamed out of a phone book.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word took seventy years to settle on a name, and its bears were originally three bachelors.
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One more beat.
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BonusGOLDILOCKS
When Robert Southey published The Story of the Three Bears in 1837, the intruder was a foul-mouthed old woman and the bears were three gentlemen of different sizes who lived together. Eleanor Mure had written a rhyming version for her nephew in 1831, also with an old woman, and in that one the bears finally impale her on the steeple of St Paul's. Joseph Cundall turned the trespasser into a little girl called Silver-Hair in 1850, explaining that there were already enough stories about old women; she became Silver-Locks, then Golden Hair, and a lowercase "goldilocks" is applied to her in a letter of 1875. By 1904 the name was fixed, and Flora Annie Steel's English Fairy Tales of 1918 made it universal, along with the father, mother and baby bear. "Goldilocks," it turns out, was the last thing about the story to be decided; the porridge was there from the start.
The full story: Where does the name Goldilocks come from? →1GARFIELD
Jim Davis, who had drawn a gnat called Gnorm for five years without selling it, noticed that the comics pages were full of dogs and had no cats, and launched an orange tabby on 19 June 1978. He named him for his grandfather, James Garfield Davis, who carried the name of the assassinated president James A. Garfield. Davis has described the grandfather as a large, cantankerous man, and "Garfield" the cat inherited the temperament along with the name.
The full story: Where does the name Garfield come from? →2OBSESSION
Latin "obsidere" is to sit down before a city, that is, to besiege it, and "obsessio" was the siege. English took "obsession" in the 1510s in exactly that sense, and around 1600 the theologians gave it a new one: a demon that besieged a person from outside was an obsession, as opposed to a possession, where the spirit got in. Doctors kept the picture when the demons left. "Obsession" for a fixed idea that will not go away is 1670s in a general sense, and the precise psychiatric meaning, an intrusive thought the patient cannot shake, dates from 1901. The city is still under siege; it is just that the army is now your own.
3LARA CROFT
Toby Gard's original design at Core Design in Derby was Laura Cruz, a South American adventurer with a long braid. Co-creator Paul Douglas changed the first name to Lara because he preferred its derivation, from Larissa, "citadel," which suited a guarded character, and the writer Vicky Arnold swapped Cruz for a British surname of similar shape, found by leafing through the Derby phone book. The backstory was rewritten to match, and "Lara Croft" of Surrey appeared in Tomb Raider in 1996, named after a stranger in the East Midlands who has presumably never been told.
4DUFFEL
Duffel is a town in the Belgian province of Antwerp, in old Brabant, and the thick woollen cloth sold there was "duffel" in Dutch and in English by the 1670s. The cloth made coats, and the Navy's hooded duffel coat became Field Marshal Montgomery's trademark in the Second World War. The "duffel bag," a sailor's or soldier's cylindrical kit bag made from the same stuff, is American English, recorded in 1915, and has long since stopped being made of anything from Duffel.
5INCENTIVE
Latin "incentivus" is "setting the tune," from "incinere," to strike up a song, from "canere," to sing; an "incentivus" was the piper who gave the note the rest followed. Late Latin writers, perhaps confusing it with "incendere," to set on fire, used it for anything that kindled the passions, and English took "incentive" in the 1400s as something that provokes or incites. The sense of a reward offered to make people work harder is 20th-century management English, but the piper is still in there: an incentive sets the tune the workforce is supposed to follow.
6LAVISH
Old French "lavasse" or "lavache" was a torrent of rain, a deluge, from "laver," to wash, from Latin "lavare." Middle English borrowed it as a noun, "lavas," profusion, and by the mid-1400s "lavish" was an adjective for spending or giving in a flood; the verb followed in the 1540s. The same washing root gives "deluge," "ablution," "lavatory," "latrine" and "launder," so a lavish host and a laundry are, at the root, both pouring water about.
The full story: Where does the word "lavish" come from? →7OPTIMUS PRIME
When Hasbro brought Takara's transforming toys to America in 1984, the truck was called Battle Convoy, and he is still Convoy in Japan. Marvel Comics was hired to supply names and personalities, and the editor Dennis O'Neil, who had just overseen Batman, named the leader: "optimus" is Latin for best, and "prime," from Latin "primus," is first. Bob Budiansky named most of the rest of the cast. "Optimus Prime" is therefore the one Autobot whose name is a Latin report card, and Peter Cullen has been reading it out since 1984.
8CHESS
The game is Sanskrit "chaturanga," the four arms of an army, which became Persian "chatrang" and Arabic "shatranj," the name Spanish still uses as "ajedrez." Europe, though, named the game for its decisive move. "Shah," the Persian for king, was the warning called out when the king was attacked; it became Arabic and then Vulgar Latin "scaccus," Old French "eschec," and English "check," and the plural "esches," checks, became "chess" in the 1200s. "Checkmate" is "shah mat," the king is helpless, and "exchequer," the treasury, is the same word, from the chequered cloth on which the king's accountants counted.
The full story: Where does the word "chess" come from? →9KOWTOW
Chinese "ketou," in older romanisation "k'o-t'ou," is "knock the head": the ceremonial prostration in which a subject knelt and touched the forehead to the floor before the emperor, three kneelings and nine knockings for the full version. British envoys refused to perform it, and the 1793 Macartney embassy foundered partly on the question, which is how the word reached English as a noun in 1804. By 1826 "kowtow" was a verb meaning to grovel in general, and that figurative sense is older in English than the literal one, recorded only from 1848.
The full story: Where does the word "kowtow" come from? →10SLOGAN
Scottish Gaelic "sluagh-ghairm" is "army cry," from "sluagh," host, and "gairm," shout, and the Highland clans each had one, bellowed as they charged. English spelled it "slogorne" and "slughorne" in the 1510s, and Chatterton, misreading the second, invented a mythical horn called a slughorn that Browning later blew in Childe Roland. By 1704 a "slogan" was any party's rallying phrase, and the 20th century handed the clan war cry to the advertising agencies, where it is now shouted on behalf of soap.
The full story: Where does the word "slogan" come from? →A besieged city, a Latin piper, a Belgian wool town, a Derby phone book: each of today's words was lifted out of one place and set to work in another. Somewhere the original owners, like the bears, came home to find someone else in the chair.