🚨 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 camera is spelled out of an anagram set, an egg dish is a knife blade, and a marriage starts to wane.
⌄ ⌄ ⌄
Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word has a letter in it that the man it is named for never used.
⌄ ⌄ ⌄
One more beat.
⌄ ⌄ ⌄ last chance ⌄ ⌄ ⌄
BonusMACKINTOSH
Charles Macintosh, a Glasgow chemist with a dye works, worked out in the early 1820s that rubber would dissolve in the naphtha distilled from coal tar, and that the solution, painted between two layers of cloth, made a fabric rain could not get through. He patented it in 1823, the coats went on sale in 1824, and the public, who could not leave a Scottish surname alone, spelled them with a k. The early ones were a trial: they smelt of tar, went rigid in the cold and turned sticky in the heat. Thomas Hancock, whose firm merged with Macintosh's in 1830, solved most of that with vulcanisation in 1843. By then the "mackintosh" was already generic, "mac" followed, and the same surname, spelled differently again, is on an apple and a computer.
The full story: Where does the word "mackintosh" come from? →1MESMERIZE
Franz Anton Mesmer, born in Swabia in 1734 and practising in Vienna and then Paris, believed that an invisible fluid he called animal magnetism flowed through all living things, and that he could cure illness by redirecting it with passes of his hands, iron rods and a tub of magnetised water around which his fashionable patients sat holding hands. In 1784 Louis XVI appointed a commission that included Benjamin Franklin and Lavoisier; it found no fluid and attributed the effects to imagination. Mesmer left Paris, but his technique did not, and "mesmerize," recorded in 1829, has drifted from subjecting someone to his treatment, to hypnotising, to simply holding them spellbound, which is roughly what he did.
The full story: Where does the word "mesmerize" come from? →2ADONIS
The beautiful youth loved by Aphrodite, killed by a boar while hunting, and mourned each year at the Adonia with little gardens of fast-sprouting seedlings left to wither in the sun, has a name that is not Greek at all. It is Canaanite "adon," lord, the title the Phoenicians gave the god whose death and return they marked, and the same word gives the Hebrew Adonai, "my Lord," still used in place of the divine name. The Greeks took the title for a name, made a myth of it, and "Adonis" has been the standard word for an improbably handsome young man since the 1600s.
3CYNIC
Greek "kynikos" is "dog-like," and it was the name of the school of Antisthenes, a pupil of Socrates, whose followers, Diogenes most famously, lived in deliberate squalor and barked at everyone's pretensions. The ancients already explained the name by the philosophers' snarling, shameless, dog-like behaviour, and Diogenes embraced it. The likelier origin is duller: Antisthenes taught at the Kynosarges, "the Grey Dog," a gymnasium outside Athens open to those who were not full citizens. English took "cynic" for the philosophers in the 1550s and by the 1590s had the lowercase sneerer, who doubts everybody's sincerity and is not a philosopher at all.
The full story: Where does the word "cynic" come from? →4KODAK
George Eastman wanted a trademark that was short, impossible to mispronounce, unlike any existing word and not associated with anything, and he liked the letter K, "a strong, incisive sort of letter." He and his mother Maria sat down with an anagram set and shuffled letters until they had a word that started and ended with it. He registered "Kodak" in 1888, the same year as the first roll-film camera and the slogan "You press the button, we do the rest," and a 1920 company advertisement was still boasting that the name had been "simply invented" out of the alphabet to meet the law's requirements. It meant nothing and it still does.
The full story: How did Kodak get its name? →5IMBECILE
Latin "imbecillus" is "weak, feeble," and that is what "imbecile" meant when English took it from French in the 1540s: physically frail. The sense drifted to mental weakness in the 1700s, the noun for a feeble-minded person is recorded in 1802, and in the early 20th century it was a clinical grade, between idiot and moron, with a defined mental age, which is why all three words have become plain insults. The etymology every dictionary used to give, "without a staff," from "in" and "baculum," a walking stick, as of someone who cannot stand unsupported, is now regarded as improbable on phonological grounds; the Latin word's real origin is unknown.
The full story: Where does the word "imbecile" come from? →6NIVEA
Latin "niveus" is snowy, snow-white, and "nivea" is its feminine form. The Hamburg firm Beiersdorf had been using the name on a soap when, in 1911, its owner Oscar Troplowitz put it on a face cream built around Eucerit, a lanolin emulsifier patented by the chemist Isaac Lifschütz in 1900 and the first thing that would hold water and oil together stably. The cream was white as the name promised. It went into its blue tin with white lettering in 1925, and "Nivea" is now one of the few brand names most of the world can translate without knowing it.
The full story: How did Nivea get its name? →7TOXIC
Greek "toxon" is a bow, and "toxikon pharmakon" was the drug for the bow, the poison that archers smeared on arrowheads; the Greeks are thought to have borrowed the word for bow itself from the Scythians, who were the archers they feared most. Latin dropped the drug and kept "toxicum" for poison in general, Late Latin made the adjective "toxicus," and English took "toxic" in the 1660s for anything to do with poison. "Intoxicate" is the same word and originally meant to poison, which anyone who has been intoxicated will recognise. Toxic waste was a medical term for a toxin in 1888 and became chemical and radioactive in 1955; the toxic workplace and the toxic relationship are more recent, and the bow has long since left the word.
8OMELETTE
The word is a knife blade that has been dropped and picked up wrongly several times. Latin "lamella," a small thin plate, became Old French "lemelle," a blade; "la lemelle" was misheard as "l'alemelle," which was also used for the flat egg dish because of its shape; the suffix shifted to give "alemette"; the letters swapped to give "amelette," recorded in 1480; and in the south of France the first vowel changed to o, probably under the influence of "oeuf," egg, producing "omelette" by the mid-1500s. English picked it up from Cotgrave's French dictionary of 1611. Before all this the French called the dish an "arboulastre," which nobody has missed.
The full story: Where does the word "omelette" come from? →9SARCASM
Greek "sarkazein" is to tear flesh, from "sarx," flesh, and by extension to bite one's lip in rage, to gnash the teeth, to speak bitterly; "sarkasmos" was the sneer that resulted. Late Latin took it, and English had "sarcasmus" in the 1570s and the modern spelling by the 1610s. "Sarcasm" differs from satire, the old dictionaries say, in being short, personal and not interested in reforming anyone, which is a fair description of being flayed.
The full story: Where does the word "sarcasm" come from? →10HONEYMOON
The word is first recorded in 1546, in John Heywood's collection of proverbs, and already as a warning: the sweetness of a new marriage does not last. When John Higgins revised Huloet's dictionary in 1572 he defined "hony moone" as the term applied to newly married couples "the likelyhode of their exceading loue appearing to aswage," love waning like the moon after it is full. The sense was always about the ending, not the honey. The meaning of a trip taken after the wedding is first recorded in 1791, and "honeymoon" is now applied to new presidents, new managers and new coalitions, with the original pessimism intact.
The full story: Where does the word "honeymoon" come from? →A chemist's misspelled surname, a quack's magnetism, an anagram set, a dropped knife blade: half of today's words were made deliberately and the other half by accident, and after a century or two it is impossible to tell which were which.