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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 planet is nearly named after a Frenchman, a demon becomes a scruffy child, and a dockyard becomes a football club.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus name was built, on purpose, to sound like old colonial money.
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One more beat.
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BonusBRUCE WAYNE
Bill Finger, who wrote the first Batman stories for Bob Kane in 1939 and went uncredited for most of his life, explained the name himself. The first name came from Robert the Bruce, "the Scottish patriot." For the surname he wanted something that smelt of the colonial gentry, since a playboy had to be a man of family money; he considered Adams and Hancock, and then "thought of Mad Anthony Wayne," the Revolutionary general who stormed Stony Point with bayonets in 1779 and whose nickname came from his temper rather than his sanity. Finger also talked Kane out of a domino mask and a pair of stiff wings, suggested the cowl, the cape, the gloves and the grey, and wrote the Detective Comics #27 script, which is why DC finally added his name to the credits in 2015. "Bruce Wayne" is a Scottish king and a Pennsylvania general, stitched together in the Bronx.
1BLACKMAIL
On the Anglo-Scottish border in the 1500s and 1600s, the clans and freebooters who ran the reiving trade sold protection: a landholder paid them, and his cattle stayed in his byre. "Mail" was an old northern word for rent or tribute, from a Norse word for an agreement, and the honest rent a tenant paid in silver was "white mail," so the extorted kind was black. Parliament outlawed it under that name in 1601, which did not stop it. "Blackmail" kept the sense of money extracted by threat, and in the 1800s narrowed to the threat we mean now, the one about telling.
2RAGAMUFFIN
In William Langland's Piers Plowman, written in the 1370s and 80s, "Ragamoffyn" is one of the devils of hell, and that is the word's first appearance. The front half is "rag," which in Middle English was also a surname and a general insult for a ragged, slow-witted person; the back half is a mystery, possibly one of two Anglo-Norman words for a devil or scoundrel, and Dr Johnson gave up on it, deriving the whole "from rag and I know not what else." By Shakespeare's day it meant a dirty, tattered fellow, and later a child. In New York, until the 1930s, Thanksgiving was Ragamuffin Day, when children dressed as beggars and went door to door for pennies and fruit; the custom died, and the costumes moved to Halloween. "Ragamuffin" went from demon to urchin in three centuries, which is roughly the usual direction.
3UPSHOT
In 1531 the "upshot" was the final shot of an archery match, the one that decided the contest, and from there it came to mean the end aimed at and then, by the 1600s, the final result of anything. The sport went out of the language; the last arrow stayed. "Upshot" is now the word for a conclusion, and most people who use it have never drawn a bow.
4CURFEW
Anglo-French "coverfeu" is "cover the fire," and the curfew was the bell rung in medieval towns in the evening to tell householders to bank or cover their hearths before bed, because in a street of timber houses one untended fire could burn the lot. English had the bell by the 1300s, and the "curfew" that Gray's ploughman hears tolling the knell of parting day in 1751 is still that one. The legal sense, an order to be off the streets or indoors by a set hour, grew out of the bell and is the only one most people know; the fire-cover itself, a domed metal lid for banking embers, is also a "curfew" in the antiques trade.
5EXQUISITE
Latin "exquisitus" is "carefully sought out," the past participle of "exquirere," to search out thoroughly, and when English took "exquisite" in the early 1400s it meant chosen with care, elaborate, and could describe anything made with great refinement, pleasant or not: an exquisite torture, an exquisite disease, an exquisite revenge. The modern sense of consummate loveliness is first recorded in Lyly's Euphues in 1579, and the older neutral one survives in "exquisite pain." From 1819 the word was also a noun for a dandy, a man exquisite in his own estimation.
6WISCONSIN
Father Jacques Marquette, paddling down the river with Louis Jolliet in June 1673, wrote the name the Miami gave it as "Meskousing"; La Salle's copyists misread it as "Ouisconsin," the French kept that, and the Americans anglicised it, fixing the spelling when the territory was organised in 1836. What it meant was unknown for three centuries, and the state's official "gathering of waters" was a guess. In 2003 the linguist Michael McCafferty showed that the Miami-Illinois word means "it lies red," a river running through a red place, for the red sandstone bluffs at the Dells. "Wisconsin" is also, as Day 87 noted, the river that may have given Oregon its name by being printed across two lines.
7ARSENAL
Arabic "dar as-sina'a" is "house of manufacture," a workshop, and the Venetians took it for the great state dockyard they called the Arzanà, where galleys were built on something like a production line and where Dante sets a scene in the Inferno. English borrowed "arsenal" around 1500 for a dockyard with its stores, and by the 1570s it meant a place where weapons were made or kept, which is the sense that stuck. The Royal Arsenal at Woolwich was the government's gun factory, and in 1886 its workers founded a football club, which kept the name when it moved across London to Highbury in 1913.
8YANKEE
Nobody is certain. The name was borne by a handful of Caribbean pirates and privateers in the 1680s, an enslaved man in 1725 and a Massachusetts farmer nicknamed "Yankey" in 1728, and in 1758 General Wolfe used "Yankees" for the colonial troops under his command, the first time it clearly means an American. The best guess is Dutch "Janke," a pet form of Jan, applied by or to the Dutch of the Hudson valley and spreading to their New England neighbours; a British officer's 1777 claim that it was Cherokee for "coward" is a fabrication, since the word predates the war it would have needed. Southerners used "Yankee" for New Englanders, the British used it for all Americans, and Americans have accepted or resented it depending on the century.
9NEPTUNE
Johann Galle found the planet on 23 September 1846, within a degree of where Urbain Le Verrier had calculated it must be from the wobbles in Uranus's orbit, and the naming fight started at once. Galle suggested Janus; James Challis in Cambridge suggested Oceanus; Le Verrier proposed Neptune, then changed his mind and, with Arago's backing, proposed Le Verrier, falsely claiming the Bureau des Longitudes approved, while French almanacs pointedly revived "Herschel" for Uranus to make the precedent. Astronomers outside France would have none of it, and in December Struve at Pulkovo came out for Neptune, partly because the planet looked sea-blue in the eyepiece. "Neptune" is the Roman sea god whose own name is of uncertain origin, possibly from a root meaning moist, which suits.
10ENVY
Latin "invidia" is from "invidere," to look upon, and specifically to look at someone with ill will, the hostile stare the Romans connected with the evil eye. Old French made it "envie," and English took "envy" in the late 1200s, where it replaced two Old English words for the feeling, "anda" and "nith." Latin has the same root in "video"; the deadly sin is, at bottom, a way of looking.
A Scottish king, a border racket, a demon, a last arrow, a bell, a dockyard, a misread river: today's words all began as something concrete and specific, and ended as something everyone uses without a picture in mind.