🚨 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 flatterer shows you a fig, a sea witch is a drag queen, and a wild horse belongs to a shepherds' union.
⌄ ⌄ ⌄
Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word was borrowed from the memoir of a one-legged Welsh poet.
⌄ ⌄ ⌄
One more beat.
⌄ ⌄ ⌄ last chance ⌄ ⌄ ⌄
BonusSUPERTRAMP
Rick Davies formed the band in 1969 with money from a Dutch millionaire, Stanley August Miesegaes, and called it Daddy. In January 1970, partly to avoid confusion with a group called Daddy Longlegs, guitarist Richard Palmer proposed a name from a book on his shelf: The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, W. H. Davies's 1908 account of the years he spent as a hobo in America, riding freight trains and sleeping in doss-houses, until he lost a leg jumping a train in Canada and came home to write poetry. George Bernard Shaw wrote the preface, and Davies went on to write "What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare." "Supertramp" got Breakfast in America out of the name; the poet, who died in 1940, got nothing, but then he was not the type to mind.
1SYCOPHANT
Greek "sykophantes" is "fig-shower," from "sykon," fig, and "phainein," to show, and in Athens it meant a professional informer or malicious accuser, the kind of man who made a living bringing lawsuits. Why figs? The old story, that informers reported people smuggling figs out of Attica in breach of an export ban, has no ancient evidence behind it and modern scholars reject it. The likelier explanation is the fig sign, an obscene gesture made with the thumb between two fingers, so the informer was a man who gave the fig to the people he denounced. English took "sycophant" in the 1500s as an informer, then a tale-bearer to the powerful, and finally a servile flatterer, the sense that has eaten all the others.
The full story: Where does the word "sycophant" come from? →2URSULA
The name is Latin, a diminutive of "ursa," she-bear: little she-bear. The legendary St Ursula, a Breton princess martyred with eleven thousand virgins at Cologne, gave it to the Ursuline nuns and to centuries of European girls. Disney gave it to the sea witch in The Little Mermaid (1989), and the animator Ruben Aquino drew her after the drag performer Divine, Harris Glenn Milstead, taking the eye makeup, the jewellery and the body; an early version with a mohawk and tattoos was dropped as too much. Pat Carroll, who voiced her, said she borrowed much of the attitude from the lyricist Howard Ashman, who demonstrated Poor Unfortunate Souls for her in a performance she never forgot. "Ursula" has six tentacles rather than eight because eight were too expensive to animate.
3PLATOON
French "peloton" is a little ball, a diminutive of "pelote," and in the 1500s it also meant a cluster of people, a knot of soldiers who moved and fired together. English borrowed it as "platoon" in the 1630s for a small unit detached from the main body, and the army has kept it. The French word was borrowed again, unchanged, in 1706 and is now the one cyclists use for the main bunch in a road race, so a peloton and a platoon are the same little ball, one on wheels and one on foot. Baseball turned it into a verb in 1967 for alternating two players in one position.
4ENERGY
Aristotle made up "energeia," from "en" and "ergon," work, for one of his central ideas: actuality, the state of being at work, as opposed to "dynamis," mere potential. Late Latin writers misunderstood it as vigour of style, and English borrowed "energy" in the 1590s for "force of expression." The general sense of power or vigour is 1660s. Thomas Young, the polymath who also helped read the Rosetta Stone, used the word in its modern physical sense in lectures to the Royal Society in 1802, published in 1807, for the quantity previously called "vis viva," proposing that mass times velocity squared "may properly be termed its energy." Physics took him up on it, and "energy crisis" arrived in 1970.
5RIHANNA
She was born Robyn Rihanna Fenty in Saint Michael, Barbados, in 1988, and has performed under her middle name since she was signed as a teenager. When she launched a beauty brand in 2017 she named it Fenty, after the surname, and explained the choice herself: she used Fenty, she said, so that you did not have to hear the word "Rihanna" every time you saw something she had made, having watched other celebrity brands dilute the name they were built on. "Rihanna" is reserved for the music; Fenty is for the lipstick and the lingerie; and Robyn, by her own account, is who she actually is.
6TRON
Steven Lisberger has explained the name himself: Tron is for electronic, the middle of the word chopped out and set glowing. He first drew the character in the mid-1970s for a thirty-second backlit animation advertising his studio and some rock radio stations, a glowing yellow figure, later blue, and after seeing Pong decided that the inside of a video game was where such a creature belonged. In the 1982 Disney film "Tron" is a security program written by Alan Bradley to police the system, and the title went to him rather than to Flynn, the human who gets digitised, which still confuses people who watch it for the first time.
7RUBBERNECK
American slang of 1896 for a person who stretches the neck to stare or to overhear, as if it were made of rubber, and used by 1897 as a verb. New York's sightseeing wagons became "rubberneck wagons" and their passengers rubbernecks, and the word later attached itself to the motorists who slow down to look at a crash on the other carriageway, the sense in which "rubberneck" survives. "Rubbernecker" is recorded from 1934, and traffic engineers now talk soberly of "rubbernecking delay," which is what it costs everyone else.
The full story: Where does the word "rubberneck" come from? →8APOSTROPHE
Both apostrophes are Greek "apostrophe," a turning away, from "apo," away, and "strephein," to turn. The rhetorical one came first, into English in the 1530s: an orator turns away from the audience to address someone absent or dead, as Mark Antony turns to the corpse of Caesar. The punctuation mark followed in the 1580s, from "apostrophos," the sign that a letter had been turned away, that is, omitted, as in "o'er." English used it for the dropped "e" in the old possessive "-es" and then, in the 1700s, for all possessives whether or not an "e" had ever been there, which is why the "apostrophe" is now the most misused mark in the language and the greengrocer's apostrophe has a name of its own.
9MUSTANG
The Mesta was the powerful guild of Castilian sheep and cattle owners, chartered in 1273, and in Spanish a "mesteño" was an animal belonging to the Mesta, in particular a stray that the guild claimed when it was rounded up. In Mexican Spanish "mestengo" meant any strayed or ownerless animal, and when English speakers met the wild herds of the Texas plains, descended from horses the Spanish had brought, they borrowed the word for them in 1808. A "mustang" is therefore, by name, a stray that belongs to a shepherds' union, which the horses have never acknowledged and Ford did not mention.
10POLTERGEIST
German "Poltergeist" is a "rumbling spirit," from "poltern," to knock, rattle and make a din, and "Geist," ghost. Martin Luther used the word in the 1500s, and English borrowed it in 1838 for the specific kind of haunting in which nothing is seen but objects fly, doors slam and crockery breaks. Northern English folklore had already had a name for the same nuisance, the boggart, but "poltergeist" won, helped along by psychical researchers in the 1880s and by Steven Spielberg in 1982, the same year as Tron, as it happens.
Figs, bears, little balls, strays and rumbling spirits: today's words all began as pictures of something, and the picture was usually ruder, smaller or noisier than the thing it ended up naming.