The Origin of Everyday

Sunday

It was fitting that Dorothy lived in Kansas. With over 1,200 tornadoes annually, the US experiences about four times more twisters than all other nations combined, and the Great Plains states are America’s “Tornado Alley.” Two huge geographic features cause this: The Rocky Mountains and the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf, Earth’s warmest water body at its latitude, supplies warm, moist air that flows north at low altitudes. When this meets cold, dry, high air blowing off the Rocky Mountains, the recipe is perfect for forming tornadoes.

Monday

“Death spiral” often refers to a causation loop which makes the situation continuously worse. For example, a small town loses population, so it takes in less tax money to fund basic services, so it raises taxes to make up the loss, causing more residents to leave and flee the higher taxes, etc. However, “death spiral” (AKA “graveyard spiral”) was originally an aviation term which began when early pilots experienced extreme sensory disorientation from flying through clouds, dense fog, or darkness with no view of the horizon for reference. Pilots often reacted to this with an instinctive slow turn, but disjointed visual and equilibrium cues led them to misjudge actual angle and elevation, causing pilots to bank further and descend more, initiating a “death spiral” which was often ended in a crash. On-board instruments were developed to give pilots a better sense of their true positions and orientation relative to the horizon when personal perceptions could not be relied on.

Tuesday

The often-raucous party game Twister began with a flash of inspiration from an ad executive hired to do something much different: create a promotional display for a shoe polish company (this same executive, Reyn Guyer, later invented the Nerf ball). He brought in some game developers, and after passing on the name “King’s Footsie,” and finding “Pretzel” unavailable, settled on “Twister” before selling Milton-Bradley the rights to it. Twister did not initially sell well, since company execs had reservations about the sexually suggestive nature of the game, and Sears wouldn’t sell it in their catalog for the same reason. However, in May of 1966, Johnny Carson and the beautiful Eva Gabor played the game on The Tonight Show to great hilarity, and it became an immediate success.

Wednesday

The invention of the screw thread goes back to about 4000 BC, but its use as a fastener came last. Early screw threads were used in food presses to produce oil and juice, particularly from olives and grapes. Later the water screw was employed as an efficient pre-motorized water removal device, and only in the late 1700s was a reliable screw-cutting lathe developed so that large-scale fastener screw manufacturing was possible.

Thursday

“The eye of the storm” in common language means to be in the center of a large, often public dispute. In terms of hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones, however, the center, or “eye” is typically of a lower pressure and much more peaceful than the spiraling storm whose walls encircle it.

Friday

The Slinky was invented by accident when engineer Richard James, working on springs to steady sensitive Navy equipment at sea, knocked one off the shelf an observed its famous motion. He and his wife borrowed $500 to develop the toy, and by the end of the 20th century, a quarter billion had been sold.

Saturday

A spiral is one of the three classifications of galaxy shape, along with elliptical and irregular. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way, is elliptical.

Sunday

The modern Olympics began in 1896, but were inspired by the originals about 3,000 years before. Those took place every four years near Greece’s Mount Olympus (hence the name), mythological home of the gods, in a 6-week festival to honor the god Zeus.

Monday

The Covid-19 pandemic postponed the 2020 Tokyo Olympics until 2021, but major world events caused earlier games to be cancelled altogether. There were no Olympics in 1916 due to World War I, and none in 1940 or 1944 because of World War II.

Tuesday

The five rings of the Olympic flag, when first created, represented the five continents of “America” (both North and South), Europe, Asia, Africa, and “Oceania” or Australia. Nowadays, we recognize North and South America as different continents and Antarctica as a continent as well, albeit one that has never sent athletes to the Olympics.

Wednesday

The five colors of the rings in the Olympic flag, including the white background, included the colors of the flags of all the countries that were competing when the flag was first designed.

Thursday

The first 13 ancient Olympics had only one event. It was a foot race over a distance comparable to the modern 200-meter event. This 600-foot distance was called a “stade” or “stadion,” and is the origin of the modern word “stadium.”

Friday

The first dedicated Winter Olympics took place in 1924 in the French Alps.

Saturday

Dress and uniform were non-issues at many ancient Olympics. Athletes – all men – often competed naked, barefoot, and rubbed with olive oil. Notably, the word “gymnasium” means “school for naked exercise.”

Sunday

For centuries cities have had more and less affluent sections, but the growth of industry and railroads often made that dividing line clearer, giving birth to the idiom about “the wrong side of the tracks.” This phenomenon was put nicely by author Thorne Smith in 1929: “In most commuting towns…there are always two sides of which tracks serve as a demarcation. There is the right side and the wrong side. Translated into terms of modern American idealism, this means the rich side and the side that hopes to be rich.”

Monday

“Thug” is originally a Hindi word meaning a cheat or thief. Beginning in 14th-century India, Thugs were organized groups of highwaymen who robbed and killed travelers after first gaining their trust.

Tuesday

During Seattle’s railroad construction boom of the mid-1800, logs were rolled to construction sites down roads made of logs, which helped keep them out of the plentiful local mud. These wooded roads were called “skid roads,” and the original skid road is Yesler Way in Seattle. However, since railroad work was seasonal and often done by transient workers, the neighborhoods around the “skid roads” were often impoverished and became known as “skid rows” and a line dividing wealthier and poorer neighborhoods.

Wednesday

“Hoodlum,” as a term for up-to-no-good criminal-minded men, first appeared in San Fransisco magazines from 1871 and spread quickly from there. Any relation to a particular language is disputed, although early “hoodlums” seemed inclined to terrorize recent Chinese immigrants.

Thursday

Modern troubled city neighborhoods are sometimes called “ghettos,” but this term first specifically described segregated Jewish sections. Centuries before WWII, many European cities placed their Jewish populations in particular neighborhoods and subjected them to unique restrictions. The first slum may have been in Venice in 1516, where Jews lived on a small island in a part of the city known locally as “New Ghetto.” This practice of forced Jewish segregation had largely ended by the late 1800s, but was later revived by the Nazis with ghastly results.

Friday

“Ruffian” means a violent brute or criminal, but the original Italian meaning was closer to that of a pimp or panderer. Similarly, “bully” began with a less violent – and even affectionate – connotation.

Saturday

The word “slum” as describing a poor urban area comes from 1820’s England, but has more than one plausible origin. Since industries were often built near waterways to take advantage of this pre-railroad transport route, the houses of the working poor which arose near the factories tended to be on swampy, poorly-drained land. “Slump” is a name for this marshy land, which was thought to turn to “slum.” Alternatively, the word “slum” also meant “room” in British slang but changed to mean “back room / alley,” especially full of poor people.

Hoskins, William George. 1977. The Making of the English Landscape. Repr. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Sunday

Soft drinks contain no alcohol, and so were first called soft to differentiate them from hard liquor.

Monday

Often people are said to “soft pedal” inconvenient information or positions they’ve taken before. This is actually a reference to the soft pedal on a piano, which quiets tones when pressed.

Tuesday

The game of softball was born of an Ivy League alumni rivalry. One day in November 1887, some Yale and Harvard alumni at Chicago’s Farragut Boat Club finally got word that Yale had won their football game against Harvard, causing one exited Yale alum to throw an old boxing glove at a Harvard alum, who attempted to hit it back with a stick. This led reporter George Hancock to lace up the glove like a ball, draw out the diamond’s lines with chalk, and prompt the first softball game. Over the next few decades, the rules and governing bodies were established, as was the name “softball,” since the game had, until 1926, been variously known as Indoor Ball, Kitten Ball, Playground Ball, Diamond Ball, Pumpkin Ball, Recreation Ball, Twilight Ball, Army Ball, Lightning Ball, Mushball, Big Ball, and Night Ball.

Wednesday

Computer software, the electronically-stored instructions for the machine’s operating system or applications, was first given that name in the 1960s to differentiate it from hardware, or the physical components of the computer, like screens, disk drives, and keyboards.

Thursday

Teddy Roosevelt, the first time he wrote the now-famous line “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” attributed it to an African proverb, but no record of this term being used before Teddy has been found.

Friday

“Soft power” is a modern political term for the influence that a nation develops not through traditional wealth and military might, but rather diplomacy, communication, cultural values, and goodwill.

Saturday

Similarly, a “soft sell” is an approach to promoting or selling something with subtle and gentle persuasion rather than aggressive sales techniques.

Sunday

Carbon monoxide and other toxic gasses are among the many occupational dangers to coal miners, and the practice of bringing canaries into coal mines persisted from 1911 to 1986. If the bird suddenly got sick or died, it suggested that a deadly gas was present, and the miners should get out, hence the metaphor “canary in the coal mine” as an early indicator. Animals that serve an environmental warning role to humans are sometimes called “sentinel species.”

Monday

The old saying “Red sky at night, sailor’s delight; red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning” has variations in Shakespeare and the Bible. This red color is attributable to water vapor or dust splitting sun rays into their color spectrums when they pass sideways through the most atmosphere. Thus, color at those times hints at the atmosphere’s contents, which play a big role in weather. However, the saying is most accurate in the middle latitudes when weather systems move from west to east.

Tuesday

Talking about a “shot across the bow” is similar to saying “a warning shot,” or a warning gesture to show that you’re serious, even about using force. In the nautical sense, this means deliberately firing in front of another vessel, sometimes forcing that ship to change course or stop. This gesture has also been used to signal to an unknown ship to fly its flag, but in the modern time these efforts at identification also include attempts at radio contact.

Wednesday

“Beware the Ides of March,” the emperor is famously warned in Shakespeare’s play “Julius Caesar.” In the Roman calendar, the Ides was the 15th of each month, the day in March of 44BC that Ceasar was assasinated.

Thursday

Not surprisingly, air raid sirens became widely used when air raids themselves started happening. In the early days of aerial attacks during WWI, London was unexpectedly attacked by German zeppelins, and the sirens became a more effective way to warn people than church bells or “take cover” signs displayed in public.

Friday

Animals which are especially sensitive to environmental changes often portend natural dangers in advance. Sharks head to deeper waters before a hurricane, birds keep down before a storm, worms flee rising groundwater, and some domestic animals’ behavior has accurately predicted earthquakes, at least when they are housed near one another.

Saturday

The sinking of the British passenger ship Lusitania in 1915 by a German submarine, killing nearly 1,200 civilians, was a major WWI tragedy, but shouldn’t have been an utter surprise. The German embassy had run ads in the New York Times and other papers for weeks before the event warning that they would torpedo British-flagged ships.

Sunday

IQ = Intelligence quotient

Monday

SCOTUS = Supreme Court of The United States

Tuesday

GMO = Genetically Modified Organism

Wednesday

HIPPA = Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (of 1996)

Thursday

UNESCO = United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization

Friday

FOIA = Freedom of Information Act

Saturday

YOLO = You Only Live Once

Sunday

What people now call getting “double-crossed” was previously just called getting “crossed,” that is, deceived by another. The term “double cross” appeared in 1834 to describe when an individual convinces two separate parties that that he will help them cheat the other. When the scheme plays out, both of the other parties find themselves betrayed, so there has been a “double cross.” However, when most modern people use the term, they don’t mean this complex three-party plot, just a straightforward one-person-cheating-another scenario.

Monday

The term “sold down the river” has ugly roots in American slavery. When slavery was legal, the city of Louisville, Kentucky housed one of the nation’s largest slave markets. From there, many of the purchased slaves were sent further south along the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to cotton plantations, where often-brutal treatment frequently proved fatal. Hence, getting someone “sold down the river” meant a betrayal so profound it might lead to death.

Tuesday

The names of some historical betrayers have become synonymous with “traitor.” Judas betrayed Jesus to the Romans, Brutus helped assassinate his friend and emperor Julius Caesar, and Benedict Arnold sold out his native United States to the British.

Wednesday

The word “turncoat” is born from the ancient practice of wearing a badge of your allegiance on your coat that could be hidden if you turned your coat inside out.

Thursday

Treason is the only crime defined in the US constitution.

Friday

To “drop a dime” on someone comes from the practice of making a pay phone call to the police to inform on them. These were also practical, since short, unexpected pay phone calls couldn’t be traced in these early telephone days.

Saturday

Since the late 1800s, the word “snitch” meant nose, and since nosy people are involved in others’ business, this soon came to also mean an informer.

Sunday

The term “apple of my eye” has roots back to the King James Bible, but the modern sense of a highly favored person or object goes back to the 9^th century…still not too shabby in terms of long lineages. It was previously believed that the pupil of the eye was a solid object, and the term apple – another familiar sphere – came to describe it. In these days effective eye care was in a primitive-to-nonexistent state, so eyesight was highly valued. Hence, the term lent itself to other things which were similarly precious.

Monday

Another popular eye idiom, “see eye to eye,” also has King James Bible roots, where Isaiah 52:8 reads “…for they shall see eye to eye, when the Lord shall bring again Zion.”

Tuesday

The term “private eye” to describe private investigators has two plausible origins. The famous Pinkerton Detective Agency, which began in Chicago in the 1850s and was the original in the business in the US, used in their logo the image of a staring eye and the words “We Never Sleep.” However, the equally likely origin is simply the letter “I” in “private investigator.”

Wednesday

The adult eye color of a human baby is not always knowable at birth, as there are many genes and pigments still at work. In some babies, particularly lighter-skinned ones, it may take up to 3 years for the iris color to fully establish.

Thursday

The idea of an “evil eye” that brings misfortune and undoing to the victim, often after they enjoy praise or success, goes back at least 5,000 years and is still prevalent in many cultures. Many eye images worn on clothes and jewelry are mean to repel this curse.

Friday

The eye is relaxed when viewing an object about 20 feet away, and doesn’t have to bend the light rays to focus on it. This is the reason why “20/20 vision” indicates a normal ability to see at a distance, because you can see at 20 feet something you should be able to see at 20 feet away.

Saturday

A “black eye” is really just a bruising of the area around the eye. The color comes from blood under the skin, like other bruises.