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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 hunter becomes a pirate, a scribe misreads an m, and a man turns into a wolf on the night before Halloween.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is an insult built from the surname of a man who thought he was doing families a favour.
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One more beat.
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BonusBOWDLERIZE
In 1807 The Family Shakespeare appeared anonymously in Bath: twenty plays with the indecencies cut, so that a father could read them aloud without blushing. The editor was Henrietta Bowdler, known as Harriet, a devout and well-read woman who could not, as a lady, be seen to have understood what she was removing. In 1818 her brother Thomas, a retired physician, published a ten-volume edition under his own name, advertised in The Times that December, explaining that he had erased words "of so indecent a nature" and frivolous allusions to Scripture that "call imperiously for their erasement"; Ophelia's death becomes an accident, Lady Macbeth's "damned spot" becomes "crimson," and Doll Tearsheet vanishes. Critics mocked him, the set ran to five editions by the 1860s, and he went on to do the same to Gibbon. The verb "bowdlerize" was first recorded in 1836, eleven years after his death, and was already a sneer. His sister, who did the work, got neither the credit nor the verb.
1BUCCANEER
The French hunters who lived wild on Hispaniola in the early 1600s killed the feral cattle and pigs the Spanish had left behind and cured the meat over a slow fire on a wooden frame the Tupi of Brazil called a "boucan"; the French called the men "boucaniers," and the Spanish authorities called them a nuisance. English had "buccaneer" for the hunters by 1661, and by 1676 for the pirates and privateers who raided the Spanish Main from Tortuga and Port Royal, because the hunters, driven off their islands, had taken to the sea and because the two trades drew the same sort of man. Exquemelin's history of the buccaneers, translated in 1684, fixed the pirate sense, and the barbecue is the same word by a different route.
2OPIUM
Greek "opos" is the juice or sap of a plant, and "opion" its diminutive, poppy juice: the milky latex that oozes from a scored poppy head and dries brown. Latin took it, English had "opium" in the late 1300s, and from the 1600s it was the physician's standby for pain and sleep, as laudanum, as the opium-eater's tincture, as the cargo Britain forced on China in the war named for it in 1839. Marx's 1844 line, that religion is the opium of the people, was not a sneer at the drug: in 1844 opium was what you took when nothing else would ease the pain.
3WEREWOLF
Old English "wer" is a man, the word that survives in "wergild," the price paid in Anglo-Saxon law for killing one, and "werewulf" is simply man-wolf. The word's first appearance is in Archbishop Wulfstan's law code for King Cnut around 1020, where it is a metaphor for the devil as a wolf among the flock rather than a man who changes shape; the shapeshifter arrives in the late 1100s, in Marie de France's Bisclavret and in Gervase of Tilbury, who said the English called such men "gerulfos." A 1410 hunting manual explained the name as "wary wolf," which is wrong, and "werewolf" has outlived "wer," which has otherwise been gone from English for seven hundred years.
4DAIQUIRI
Daiquirí is a beach and an iron-mining district east of Santiago de Cuba, where American troops landed in June 1898, and where an American mining engineer, Jennings Cox, is credited with mixing rum, lime and sugar for his guests, the story being that he had run out of gin. A US Navy medical officer, Lucius Johnson, tasted it there and in 1909 introduced it to the Army and Navy Club in Washington, which gave it a plaque; Hemingway drank it frozen at the Floridita in Havana in the 1930s and 40s, which gave it fame. The "daiquiri" is therefore a Taíno place name, a Cuban drink, and an American habit, in that order.
5LIBERIA
The American Colonization Society, founded in 1816 to settle freed American slaves in Africa, landed its first colonists at Cape Mesurado in 1822 and called the settlement Christopolis. In 1824 the society renamed the colony Liberia, from Latin "liber," free, with the "-ia" of a country, and the capital Monrovia, after James Monroe, the sitting president, who had signed the act that paid for the venture; the names are usually credited to Robert Goodloe Harper, a society founder, who got a town of his own in the south of the country. "Liberia" declared independence in 1847, the first republic in Africa, and the capital is still the only one outside the United States named after an American president.
6EXCRUCIATING
Latin "crux" is the cross, the Roman instrument of execution, and "cruciare" is to crucify or to torture; "excruciare" is to torment thoroughly, out of all measure. English took "excruciate" in the 1500s and had the adjective by 1599, and "excruciating" has meant unbearable pain ever since, with a cross at its centre that nobody notices. "Crucial" is the same cross, from the crossroads where a decision must be made, and "excruciatingly polite" is the cross used for comedy.
7RAVIOLI
The usual explanation is "little turnips," from "rava," a northern Italian dialect word for the turnip, on the theory that the first fillings were turnip; the trouble is that the earliest recipes, including the Lenten ones, contain no turnips at all. A mid-14th-century Venetian cookbook stuffs them with blanched herbs, egg and fresh cheese and simmers them in broth; the Prato merchant Francesco Datini mentions them in his letters; and the English Forme of Cury, compiled for Richard II's kitchen around 1390, has "rauioles." A rival theory connects the name to a cheese like robiola. "Ravioli" is thus a 600-year-old dish with a name nobody can explain, which has not hurt sales.
8INNUENDO
Latin "innuendo" is "by nodding," the ablative gerund of "innuere," to nod toward, to signal, and in medieval legal Latin it was the word a clerk used to introduce a clarification: "he (innuendo, the said John Smith) is a thief." English lawyers kept the formula, and in libel pleadings an "innuendo" is still the plaintiff's statement of what the defendant's apparently harmless words really meant. By 1689 the word had slipped out of the courtroom to mean any oblique hint, and the courtroom's association with slander gave it the flavour it has now. "Innuendo" is, by name, a nod and a wink, in a dead language.
9ZENITH
Arabic "samt ar-ra's" is "the way over the head," the direction straight up, and medieval Latin astronomers borrowed the first word. Somewhere in the copying, a scribe read the Arabic "samt," written in Latin letters, as "senit," taking the "m" for "ni," and the error was copied until it was the word: Latin "cenit," Old French "cenith," English "zenith" by the late 1300s. The same Arabic root, read correctly, gives "azimuth," from "as-sumut," the directions, and "nadir," the opposite direction, so that three technical words in every astronomy textbook are one Arabic word and one mistake. The figurative zenith, the high point of a career or an empire, dates from around 1600.
10ENORMOUS
Latin "norma" is a carpenter's square, and by extension a rule or pattern; "enormis" is "out of the square," irregular, and so abnormal, monstrous, excessive. When English took "enormous" in the 1530s it meant abnormal or wicked, and the sense of mere hugeness arrived in the 1540s and gradually drove the rest out. The noun did not follow: "enormity" kept the wickedness, and the usage writers still insist that it means great evil rather than great size, a distinction the two words themselves abandoned in the sixteenth century.
Hunters, poppies, nods, carpenters' squares and one scribe's bad eyesight: today's words were made by people doing something else, which is how words are usually made, and then cleaned up by a family who thought Shakespeare needed it.