The Origin of Everyday

Sunday

A short-tempered person is said to “fly off the handle” when upset. This pioneer-era term alludes to an ill-fitting metal axe head coming loose from its wooden handle and going airborne, an obvious danger to those nearby.

Monday

Ballistics is the study of the natural flight paths of unpowered objects; the arcs of everything from stones to bullets and cannonballs. In the military sense, any self-propelled guided missile “goes ballistic” when it is no longer under control and propulsion, and so assumes a natural free-falling trajectory. However, long-range nuclear missiles such as intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are designed to fall naturally toward their targets in the final part of their flight, and it was during the American Cold War development of these weapons when “go ballistic” grew as a figurative expression.

Tuesday

Though bulls cannot actually see the color, the term “see red” to describe intense anger may have origins in bullfighting and the bullfighter’s red cape used to incite the bulls to charge. However, the color red has long been associated with high emotion, so the term’s origin may also be unrelated to bullfighting. Interestingly, some research indicates that angrier and more hostile people actually do see the color red more often.

Wednesday

Describing someone as “livid” also invokes a color. This dark bluish or greyish color more recently came to indicate the hue of an extremely angry individual.

Thursday

In Greek mythology, unpunished wrongdoers made the Furies feel, well, furious. This trio of bat-winged, snake-haired goddesses dealt in vengeance, punishment and justice, and they had particular disdain for those who lied, murdered, sinned against the gods, and children who disobeyed or killed their parents.

Friday

However, the ancients would not have understood some modern and technical idioms for intense anger. To “blow a fuse” is to overload an electrical fuse with current beyond its capacity. (The Rolling Stones famously sang about blowing a 50-amp fuse in “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”)

Saturday

Similarly, to “blow a gasket,” which acts as a seal between metal parts in an engine’s combustion chamber, would result in a steam or liquid release in early engines, and still means very expensive repairs in modern cars.

Sunday

WD-40 stands for “Water Displacement, 40^th formula,” since the the creators’ 40^th experimental recipe fulfilled its intended purpose of preventing corrosion on the Atlas rocket.

Monday

The globally-ubiquitous AK-47 rifle is named for it’s Russian designer Mikhail Kalashnikov (AK = “Avtomat Kalashnikova” or “Automatic device by Kalashnikov”) and 1947, the year of its first manufacture.

Tuesday

In the US, a non-profit company is called a “501(c)(3),” and a tax-advantaged type of retirement account is called a “401(k)” because those are the sections where they’re described in the US Tax Code.

Wednesday

G20 or “The Group of Twenty” is a forum of the world’s major economic nations, and also the European Union, together representing 85% of the world’s economic output.

Thursday

V8 is both the Campbell’s drink made with 8 vegetables and also the name of a very common combustion engine with 8 cylinders arranged in a V shape.

Friday

Men of drafting age during WWII and the Vietnam War wondered if their local draft board might label them “1-A” (available and fit for military service) or “4-F” (unfit for military service) or any classification between. These labels were part of a statutory classification system for would-be soldiers that eventually went up to 5-A.

Saturday

License plates use letters and numbers, and a given state, province, or country will likely never run out of random combinations for their license plates. There are 26 letters in the English alphabet, and ten single numbers (0-9). Hence, for a plate with just 6 character spaces available, the possible combinations for that plate are 36 x 36 x 36 x 36 x 36 x 36, or 2,176,782,336. With “only” 15 million cars registered in America’s most populous state, California, there are plenty of plates to go around, even if the spaces, number and letter positions were more restricted.

Sunday

David Bowie grew up, in his words, as “plain old David Jones, a middle-class boy from London’s suburbs,” but as a musician he didn’t want to be confused with Davy Jones, frontman of The Monkees. “Nobody’s going to make a monkey out of you,” said his manager, and David adopted his new surname from American Jim Bowie, real-life creator of the Bowie knife, who was rebelliously portrayed in the 1960 film “The Alamo”….

Monday

…and in 1981, David Bowie recorded the song “Under Pressure” with Queen, a band which was also familiar with name changes. Their dynamic lead singer was born Farrokh Bulsara, and also went by Fred Bulsara until about 1970 when he legally changed his name to Freddie Mercury and the band’s name from “Smile” to “Queen”…

Tuesday

…and in 1984, Queen released a song called “Radio Ga-Ga.” Two years later Stefani Germanotta was born, who was later inspired by the song to adopt the stage name “Lady Gaga”…

Wednesday

…and Lady Gaga happens to be godmother to a son of Elton John, the veteran rocker who was born Reginald Kenneth Dwight…

Thursday

…and who once got a letter about the great influence of his music from Bono of U2, whose real name is Paul Hewitt…

Friday

…and human rights-loving U2 toured for an Amnesty International fundraiser in 1986, sharing the bill with The Police and their singer Sting, real name Gordon Sumner…

Saturday

…who, in his own support of the human rights group, promoted a fundraising album of covers of Bob Dylan’s songs, who himself was born Robert Allen Zimmerman.

Sunday

Though they now appear before a movie, they’re called “trailers” because they originally appeared after the film. The first trailer wasn’t even for a movie, but promoted a live musical called “The Pleasure Seekers.”

Monday

Originally, a “blockbuster” was a WWII British bomb powerful enough to destroy a city block. Soon after, the term was adopted to describe a film which grossed revenues of at least $2 million in the US and Canada.

Tuesday

Blockbuster movies often perform well at the “box office.” While the box office is the part of a modern theater which sells tickets to anyone, the term comes from Elizabethan times, when wealthier theater patrons bought tickets to private balcony sections known as “boxes.” Box ticket sales were a good indicator of a play’s financial success, and were sold separately at an office near the theater entrance.

Wednesday

We associate the term “silver screen” with the film world because original movie screens were coated with a reflective metallic paint, since this was better to view the projected images on.

Thursday

Though popcorn was popular at carnivals since the mid-1800s, the first movie theaters wanted to replicate the experience of live theaters, and so didn’t promote snacks like popcorn. However, history intervened and led to the popularization of popcorn in movie theaters. During the Great Depression, the very profitable snack kept many movie theaters in business, since it was both cheap for the cash-strapped movie goers to buy and even cheaper for the theaters to acquire. During WWII, more sugary foods were sent to the soldiers, and traditional growing regions like the Philippines were cut off from the US market, so popcorn didn’t have to compete much with sweeter snacks, further maintaining its theater dominance.

Friday

“Jaws” was the film that, in 1975, created the model for the summer blockbuster, setting the stage for its release with well-timed promotion, merchandising, and soundtrack and source novel. Before Jaws, film audiences typically went to movies in the winter, and the summer was a box office “dead zone.”

Sunday

We say that someone showing insincere grief or remorse sheds “crocodile tears.” This term traces back to a questionable report from a 14th century book asserting that crocodiles cry after eating their prey, including humans. Shakespeare and many others bought into the idea of these weeping reptiles. Crocodiles eat in the water, making the observation of extra eye moisture difficult in any era, however, tearing while eating has been observed in some close reptile relatives of crocodiles, such as caimans and alligators.

Monday

In the annual ritual of Yom Kippur, ancient Israelite priests symbolically transferred the sins of their people onto the head of a goat. The animal was then driven into the wilderness or killed, hence the term “scapegoat” for an innocent who bears the blame of others.

Tuesday

There are many versions of the old fable – including one from Aesop – in which a lion and other animals enjoy a successful hunt together only to see the lion take “the lion’s share” of the kill. In all variants, the lion claims most or all of the meal, and in one version even kills a hunting companion, too. The usual lesson of these tales is to be cautious when partnering with those more powerful.

Wednesday

Someone living or eating “high on the hog” is flaunting wealth or status because the most expensive cuts of pork are said to come from the animals’ back and upper legs. By contrast, poorer folk are more likely to buy the belly, feet, and other parts of the animal.

Thursday

Since cows are known to take their sweet time in doing nearly everything, anything that will continue “until the cows come home” will likely take a while.

Friday

The origin of the term “to let the cat out of the bag” to reveal a secret is a more debated idiom, with at least two popular origin theories. In one, the term refers to an old livestock swindle where a jostling bag claimed to contain one or more piglets for sale was revealed to contain a feline instead. The other involves the unsheathing of the brutal “cat ‘o nine tails” whip for maritime punishment in the bygone days of the British Royal Navy, with the sailor exposing the sins of his shipmate being the one to “let the cat out of the bag.”

Saturday

Once established, the social hierarchy of a chicken flock remains fixed, and the more dominant birds keep lower rankers aware of their place with painful pecks. This is the origin of the term “pecking order.”

Sunday

A successful effort is said to “pan out” because gold prospectors have long used a pan and water to wash out sand, dirt, and rocks when looking for gold ore, which sinks to the bottom of the pan and remains if the washing is done carefully.

Monday

The word “panic” comes from Pan, that horned and goat-legged Greek god. When not playing his Pan flute to nymphs in the forest, he commanded such a booming voice that his shout even terrified the giants during their mythical battle with the gods, causing them to “panic.”

Tuesday

The “Pan” in Peter Pan’s name is a reference to this goaty god.

Wednesday

Old flintlock muskets had small pans which held individual charges of gunpowder. A “flash in the pan” occurred when the gunpowder was ignited, but for whatever reason, no bullet was fired.

Thursday

Pan also means “whole,” “all inclusive,” or “involving all members” in Greek, so it is a prefix that means all possible members of a group, such as in the words panacea (cure for all ills) pandemic (relating to everyone), pandemonium (all demons, or the uproar if they were all loosed), Pantheon (temple honoring all the gods), and Pan-American, for all people in the Americas, like the Pan-American athletic games.

Friday

Pan means bread in Spanish, so your local “panederia” is a bread shop or bakery, and “pane” is bread in Italian, so “Panera” means “bread time” in Italian, or breadbasket / breadbox in Spanish. “Panis” means bread in Latin, so many Latin-based languages have this prefix.

Saturday

That room is called a “pantry” because bread was originally stored in there.

Sunday

Because of a potato-killing fungus, there are vastly more citizens of Irish descent in England and the US. The potato was a major food staple in 19^th century Ireland, so when crops were hit in 1845 with a blight lasting for seven years, up to one million Irish perished in the famine, while another million emigrated elsewhere, particularly North America and England.

Monday

The beloved Tater Tot began as an innovative way sell french fry scraps. Ore-Ida company founding brothers F. Nephi and Golden Griggs sought to do something more profitable with the irregular potato pieces left by the fry cutter than feeding the scraps to their own cows. After some smashing, blanching, shaping, spicing, and cooking, the Tater Tot was born and quickly became a staple of the frozen food boom of the 1950s.

Tuesday

The potato’s nickname of “spud” comes from a narrow spade designed to dig the potato and other rooted plants out of the ground.

Wednesday

Potatoes are tubers, a thickened plant structure that grows underground between the plant’s stem and roots, where they absorb and store energy and often help the plant survive the winter.

Thursday

French fries are quite possibly of Belgian origin, but American soldiers in WWI called them French fries after learning of them from from French-speaking Belgians.

Friday

A potato was the first vegetable ever grown in space, with the eventual goal of feeding astronauts and future planetary colonists.

Saturday

Every day, over one billion people eat at least one potato.

Sunday

PDF = Portable Document Format

Monday

GIF = Graphics Interchange Format

Tuesday

JPEG = Joint Photographic Experts Group, the group who created the JPEG standard in 1992.

Wednesday

HTML = Hypertext Markup Language

Thursday

HTTP = Hypertext Transfer Protocol

Friday

LTE (like, 5G LTE) = Long-Term Evolution

Saturday

URL = Uniform Resource Locator

Sunday

Chicago is not called “The Windy City” because its air moves especially fast. The wind came from the alleged boasting of its “windy” citizens, particularly in their efforts to get the city chosen to host the 1893 World’s Fair. These promotions, along with much last-minute financial backing, helped get Chicago chosen over rival candidates New York, St. Louis, and Washington, DC, and the fair was a great success.

Monday

The Chicago Bears were named in honor of the Chicago Cubs, who let the fledgling pro football team play at Wrigley Field starting in the 1920s. The Bears’ colors are based on the blue and orange of the University of Illinois, alma mater of team founder, first owner, player, and longtime coach “Papa Bear” George Stanley Halas. His initials “GSH” adorn the left arm of Bears’ uniforms to this day.

Tuesday

The innovative design of the Sears / Willis Tower, consisting of frames welded into nine vertical tubes of different heights, was inspired by the pattern of cigarettes pushed unevenly out of a pack.

Wednesday

Have you heard stories of political deals made in “smoke-filled rooms”? The room which birthed the term was a suite in Chicago’s Blackstone Hotel. There, in 1920, Senator Warren G. Harding was chosen as the Republican presidential nominee out of many closely-matched candidates at a deadlocked convention. He was the “compromise” candidate chosen after ten ballots, though he initially got only 7% of the votes.

Thursday

The 3-letter airport code of O’Hare Airport is “ORD” because it was originally known as Orchard Field.

Friday

Of all of the world’s rivers, only the Chicago River runs backwards. Prior to 1900, it drained into Lake Michigan, but the flow was reversed by a massive engineering project so as it would carry all that urban sewage and slaughterhouse waste away from the city rather than into its natural source of drinking water.

Saturday

The city’s name first appeared in print over 330 years ago as “Chigagou,” a native word typically translated as “wild onion,” “onion field,” “wild garlic,” or “wild leek,” as to describe a leek species found in the Chicago River watershed.

Sunday

The navigation center where ships are operated from is called the “wheelhouse,” also known as the “pilothouse” or “bridge” on larger vessels. Hence, to say someone is “in your wheelhouse” means that they are in a place which you control or feel comfortable in.

Monday

A very drunk person is often described as “three sheets to the wind.” Another great nautical idiom, the “sheets” here refer to the ropes which held the corners of a sail in place. Any ship with three untied corners of a square sail flapping in the wind had serious control and navigation issues, just as a big drunk might.

Tuesday

Boat speed is measured in knots, which means nautical miles per hour. This is similar to miles per hour in land speed, but not exactly; one knot = about 1.151 mph or 1.852 kph.

Wednesday

Oceangoing sailing ships operated with complex systems of ropes and rigging, so to “show someone the ropes” originally meant to orient them with the ship’s workings.

Thursday

When someone “shows their true colors,” a dark side is often revealed. This term started when ships (particularly 17^th century Spanish ships) carried many countries’ flags with them to mislead their enemies at sea. “True colors” were those of the ship’s actual national flag, often only shown when the deceived ship was attacked.

Friday

Someone in the doldrums may feel dispirited and unmotivated. The original doldrums are a band of calm, low-wind areas north of the equator in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans where sailing ships often got stuck or greatly slowed without winds to push them.

Saturday

“By and large” means “on the whole” because it refers to the full range of ways ships could sail relative to the wind. “By” referred to sailing into the wind or perpendicular to its direction, and “large” meant enjoying the stronger push of the wind from behind.