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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 course outline is a misprint, a cobbler becomes a social climber, and a bed-net becomes a forest.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus phrase was officially denied before it was ever confirmed.
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One more beat.
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BonusBASKET CASE
In January 1919 a rumour ran through American cities that a military hospital was holding soldiers who had come back from France with no arms and no legs, carried about in baskets, and visitors turned up asking to see them. On 18 January the Cleveland Plain Dealer printed the hospital's denial: Captain W. E. Lang said there had never been a "basket case" in any of its wards, and the Surgeon General's office said the same for the whole army. The word existed, in other words, before any such patient did, and the denials spread it. By October 1938 the Times-Picayune was calling Czechoslovakia, carved up at Munich, a basket case, the literal sense came back in the Second World War, including in a 1942 joke about Jack Benny's car, and a 1948 Life article worried that the United Nations might become "a pathetic basket case." "Basket case" now means a person or an economy past functioning, and the baskets were never real.
1BRAILLE
Louis Braille lost his sight in a childhood accident and was sent at ten to the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris, where in 1821 an army officer, Charles Barbier, demonstrated his "night writing," a twelve-dot code devised so soldiers could pass messages in the dark without speaking. Braille saw its three faults: it encoded sounds rather than letters, the twelve-dot cells were too tall to read with one touch, and it had no punctuation or numbers. By 1824, aged fifteen, he had cut the cell to six dots, which a fingertip covers at once, and assigned a pattern to each letter; he published the system in 1829. "Braille" was not adopted by his own school until 1854, two years after his death, and is now the one script that is read with the hand in every language.
2ARTICHOKE
Arabic "al-hursufa" became Old Spanish "alcarchofa" and Italian "arcicioffo," and in the north of Italy "articiocco," perhaps reshaped by "ciocco," a stump. English took that form in the 1530s, in Henry VIII's reign, and then began improving it, since a foreign word that nobody understood had to be made to mean something: early spellings include "archecokk," "hortichock," "artychough" and "hartichoake," on the theories that the thing choked you, grew in a garden, or had a heart. The modern spelling settled on the choke. The "artichoke" is a thistle bred up in North Africa, and the Jerusalem artichoke is neither from Jerusalem nor an artichoke, but a sunflower, "girasole," mangled the same way.
3SYLLABUS
The word is a printing error that got a job. In a 15th-century edition of Cicero's letters to Atticus, the Greek word "sittybas," the parchment labels attached to scrolls to show their titles, was misread or misprinted as "syllabus," and scholars, finding the new word in Cicero, assumed it was good Latin for a list. By the 1650s English was using "syllabus" for a table of contents or an outline of lectures, and the Pope used it in 1864 for his Syllabus of Errors. The plural is a battleground precisely because the word is a ghost: "syllabi" treats it as a real second-declension noun, which it never was, and "syllabuses" is what the Oxford English Dictionary, which exposed the error in 1989, prefers.
4KREMLIN
Russian "kreml'" is a citadel, the walled fortress at the heart of a medieval Russian town, and dozens survive, at Novgorod, Kazan, Nizhny Novgorod, Pskov and elsewhere. The one in Moscow, with walls and towers built by Italian engineers between the 1480s and the early 1500s, became the seat of the tsars and, from 1918, of the Soviet government, and "the Kremlin" came to mean whoever was in charge there, as "the White House" and "Downing Street" do. English borrowed the word by way of French in the 1600s. Where Russian got it is uncertain; it may be Tatar, and the dictionaries leave it at that.
5EXORBITANT
Latin "orbita" is the track a wheel leaves, and "exorbitare" is to leave it, to go off the road. Late Latin lawyers used the participle for anything that deviated from the rule, and English took "exorbitant" in the mid-1400s as a legal term for a deviation from what was right. By the 1620s it meant excessive in general, and from the 1660s it attached itself to prices, fees and rents, which is where it has stayed; an exorbitant bill has, literally, left the rut.
6TESTIFY
The story that Roman men took oaths with a hand on their testicles, and that "testify" records the custom, is told on the internet every day and is false. Latin "testis" is a witness, probably from an Indo-European phrase for a third party standing by, the disinterested person who can say what happened; "testari" is to bear witness, and "testimony," "testament," "attest" and "testify" all come from it. The Romans did also use "testis" for the testicle, as a jocular "witness to virility," but the body part was named for the witness, not the other way round, and the oath exists only in Genesis, where Abraham's servant swears with his hand under his master's thigh. English had the verb in the late 1300s.
7CANOPY
Greek "konops" is a gnat or mosquito, and a "konopeion" was an Egyptian couch hung with mosquito netting; Latin "conopeum" was the net itself, Old French "conope" a bed-curtain, and English "canope" in the late 1300s any covering hung overhead for shelter or state, the cloth over a throne or an altar. From there "canopy" spread to the top layer of a forest, the roof of a parachute and the hood over a cockpit, none of which keep off mosquitoes. The French branch of the family went the other way, from the netted bed to the bed itself, which is why a "canapé" is a sofa and, by a further leap, a thing you eat off a tray.
8ARIZONA
The name was first a ranch. The "ranchería" of Arizona was founded between 1734 and 1736 in what is now Sonora, Mexico, by a Mexican of Basque descent, and became famous in 1737 when slabs of silver were found lying on the ground nearby, the "planchas de plata" that drew prospectors and lawsuits for years. Where the ranch got its name is disputed: the standard account is O'odham "ali shonak," "small spring," heard by Spanish ears as Arizonac; the rival account, pressed by Basque scholars, is Basque "haritz ona," "the good oak," since Basque shepherds and ranchers were thick on that frontier. The territory took the name in 1863 and the state in 1912. "Arid zone," which sounds right, is a modern folk etymology with nothing behind it, and "Arizona" is either a spring or a tree.
9SNOB
In 1781 a "snob" was a shoemaker or a cobbler's apprentice, in dialect still, and by 1796 Cambridge undergraduates were using it for any townsman, anyone who was not one of them. From there it drifted to people with no claim to gentility, then, in Thackeray's hands, to people who admired gentility too much: his Snob Papers ran in Punch in 1846 and 1847 and were collected as The Book of Snobs, and "snob" has meant a worshipper of rank who looks down on everyone below him ever since. The origin of the cobbler's word is unknown. The explanation that it abbreviates "sine nobilitate," written against commoners' names in college lists, appeared in 1850 and is, as the Oxford etymologists say, a poor joke.
10EMANCIPATE
In Roman law a son remained under his father's authority, his "patria potestas," for as long as the father lived, and "emancipatio" was the formal ceremony, a triple sale and release, that set him free to own property and act for himself; the word is "e," out of, and "mancipium," ownership, from "manus," the hand, and "capere," to take. English took "emancipate" in the 1620s for setting anyone free from control, used it in the religious-toleration debates of that century and in the Catholic Emancipation campaign, and applied it to slavery only from 1776. The Romans themselves did not; their word for freeing a slave was "manumittere," to send from the hand, which is the same hand from a different direction.
A hospital denial, a misread scroll label, a cobbler, a ranch in Sonora: today's words all record a mistake of some kind, a rumour, a misprint, a sneer or a folk guess, and the mistakes have proved sturdier than the facts.