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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 fire is made of bones, a lady kneads the bread, and a carmaker is a constellation. It is the Day of the Dead, and the first half of the puzzle knows it.
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Fun fact to fill the space: today's bonus word is named after a city, by way of a soprano, by way of a diet.
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BonusMELBA TOAST
Helen Porter Mitchell of Melbourne took her stage name from her home city, dropped the second syllable, and became the most famous soprano of her age as Nellie Melba. Auguste Escoffier, who cooked at the Savoy in London while Melba was singing at Covent Garden, invented the peach Melba for her in the 1890s, and in 1897, when she was ill and had been put on a diet that forbade such things, he made her the opposite: bread sliced thin, toasted, split through the middle and toasted again until it was dry and brittle enough to keep. Cesar Ritz, who ran the hotel, is credited with naming it in conversation with Escoffier. "Melba toast" went from a sickbed to every restaurant table in the Western world, and is one of only a few foods named after a city twice removed.
1MACABRE
The "danse Macabre," the dance of Death, is first recorded in French in 1376, in a poem by Jean Le Fevre, and by the early 1400s it was a familiar picture: a skeleton or shrivelled corpse leading a line of popes, kings, ploughmen and children to the grave, each in turn. What "Macabre" meant is lost. John Lydgate, who brought it into English, seems to have taken it for the French poet's name; the most repeated theory derives it from the "Chorea Machabaeorum," the dance of the Maccabees, the seven brothers whose martyrdom was read aloud with grisly relish in the Middle Ages; and an Arabic word for graves, "maqabir," has been proposed. "Macabre" as an ordinary adjective for the gruesome is French of 1842 and English of 1889, by which time the dance was a Saint-Saens tone poem.
2EPITAPH
Greek "epitaphios" is "upon the tomb," from "epi" and "taphos," a burial, and an "epitaphios logos" was the funeral oration, the speech given over the dead; Pericles' speech for the Athenian war dead in Thucydides is the most famous. Latin kept "epitaphium" for the speech, then for the inscription that stood in for it when the speakers had gone home, and English had "epitaph" for the words on a gravestone by the 1300s. The best are short, and the best of the short, on Spike Milligan's stone, is "I told you I was ill," in Irish, because the diocese would not allow it in English.
3LADY
Old English "hlaefdige" is "hlaf," loaf, plus a word for a kneader that is not recorded on its own but is inferred from Gothic "digan," to knead, and English "dough": the lady of the house was the woman who made its bread. Her husband was the "hlafweard," the loaf-guardian, which wore down to "hlaford" and then "lord." The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls Aethelflaed, who ruled Mercia from 911 to 918 and took Derby from the Danes, "the Lady of the Mercians," so the word already meant a ruler as well as a baker. "Lady" has been shedding syllables and gaining dignity for eleven hundred years; the bread is still in there.
4BONFIRE
Samuel Johnson derived it in 1755 from French "bon," a good fire, and Noah Webster copied him; both were wrong, and Webster's successors corrected it in 1890. Middle English "bonefire" was exactly what it says, a fire of bones: a 15th-century glossary translates it as "ignis ossium," and John Mirk's Festival of 1486 distinguishes bone fires from wood fires and from mixed ones. The earliest spelling is Scots "banefyre," and "bane" was the Scots for bone for centuries after. The bones were animal, burned at midsummer and at the feasts of saints, and the word spread to any celebratory blaze outdoors; "bonfire" night, on 5 November, has been burning Guy Fawkes since 1606, and he is the only bone most of them contain.
5AMOK
Malay "amuk" is a furious attack, and the Portuguese who reached the archipelago in the early 1500s used "amouco" or "amuco" for a man in the grip of one: Duarte Barbosa, around 1516, describes men who, resolved to die, rush into the street and kill everyone they meet until they are killed themselves. The English phrase "run amok" is recorded from the 1670s, and the word has otherwise barely been used outside it. Psychiatrists later adopted "amok" for the syndrome, which turns out not to be confined to Malaya, and the phrase has long since been diluted to cover toddlers in supermarkets.
6TOYOTA
The company that Kiichiro Toyoda spun out of his father Sakichi's loom works was called Toyoda, after the family, until 1936, when it held a public competition for a new logo. The winning design spelled the name in katakana as トヨタ, Toyota, and the company adopted the spelling along with the badge. The reasons given were that the voiceless t sounded crisper than the voiced d, that the new form took eight brush strokes, a lucky number, and that it marked the step from a family business to a corporation. "Toyota" Motor Company was incorporated in 1937, and in Chinese-speaking markets the cars still carry the original characters, 豊田, read in Chinese.
7OBITUARY
Latin "obire" is to go to meet, from "ob" and "ire," and "obitum ire" was to go to meet one's death, which Latin, like English, preferred to say sideways; "obitus" was the going, the death itself. Medieval monasteries kept an "obituarius," a register of the dead with the dates on which they were to be prayed for, and English took "obituary" in the 1700s first for such a register and then for the newspaper notice that replaced it. The modern obituary, a life summed up by a stranger in six hundred words, is a Victorian invention, and the big newspapers keep thousands on file, waiting.
8AGONY
Greek "agon" was an assembly, especially one gathered to watch the games, and then the contest itself, and "agonia" was the struggle for victory, the strain of the wrestler or the runner at full stretch. The word came into English in the late 1300s for mental anguish, and above all for Christ's agony in the garden of Gethsemane, where the Gospel of Luke uses the Greek word; by the 1540s it meant the death struggle, and by about 1600 extreme bodily pain of any kind. The games are still in the family: a protagonist is the first contestant, an antagonist the one he fights, and an "agony" aunt, from 1975, presides over the contest between what readers want and what they can have.
9SUBARU
"Subaru" is the Japanese name for the Pleiades, the cluster in Taurus that the Greeks made the seven daughters of Atlas, and the word also means "to unite" or "gather together," which suited a company formed by merger: five firms came together with the parent in 1953 to make Fuji Heavy Industries, and the badge shows one large star and five small ones for them. Kenji Kita, the company's president, is said to have chosen the name for its first car, the Subaru 360 of 1958, over the entries in a public competition, because he had loved the word since childhood. "Subaru" is thus the only carmaker named for an open star cluster, and the only one whose logo is a star map, if a generous one, since the naked eye sees six Pleiades or seven and the badge settles for six.
10TWINKIE
James Dewar, a Canadian-born baker at the Continental Baking Company's plant in Schiller Park, Illinois, noticed in 1930 that the pans for strawberry shortcake fingers stood idle for most of the year, strawberries being seasonal, and filled the little sponge fingers with banana cream instead. He needed a name and saw, on a trip to St Louis, a billboard for Twinkle Toe Shoes. The banana filling lasted until the Second World War, when bananas were rationed and the company switched to vanilla, which sold so well that the original flavour never came back except as a stunt. The "Twinkie" has since been deep-fried, blamed for a murder defence it had nothing to do with, and credited with a shelf life it does not have; Dewar ate them for the rest of his life and died in 1985, at eighty-eight.
Bones, loaves, a soprano's diet, a wrestler's strain, a star cluster and a shoe advertisement: today's words all began as something you could see or hold, and the second of November, when the dead are fed and remembered, is a fair day to notice that the vocabulary of death is mostly borrowed from the kitchen.