The Origin of Everyday

Sunday

When nature calls, you use “The John” because England’s earliest flush lavatory was developed by Sir John Harrington, godson of Queen Elizabeth I, although he called his creation “Ajax.”

Monday

Centuries later, British manufacturer Thomas Crapper developed the ballcock, a flushing mechanism still used today. His name appeared on these widely-used flush toilets in Europe, which became known as “crappers.”

Tuesday

Brits also call the toilet “the loo.” Before flush toilets, many Europeans did their thing in chamber pots, then threw the contents onto the street below, a practice which now might get you arrested. Before throwing, the courtesy was to yell out “Guardez l’eau!” (“Look out for the water!”), which eventually got shortened to just “loo” to mean toilet.

Wednesday

“Lavare” means to “to wash” in Latin, and this is the source of the words “latrine” and “lavatory.”

Thursday

“Toilette,” the French word from which we get “toilet,” means dressing room, and itself comes from the word “toile,” or cloth. In the 1600s, toilet was the process of doing your hair, clothes, makeup, etc. By 19^th century America, this term referred to the room where this process occurred, and more particularly, the useful device in it.

Friday

“Potty” derives from “chamber pot,” a portable toilet people used in times past for doing their business at night.

Saturday

The room where you can find a toilet and a sink is called a “restroom” or “bathroom” more often in the US than in Britain.

Sunday

CVS = Consumer Value Stores

Monday

TED (as in TED conferences and talks) = Technology, Entertainment, and Design

Tuesday

YMCA = Young Men’s Christian Association

Wednesday

OK = “oll korrect,” a humorous misspelling of “all correct.” OK first showed up in 1839 in the Boston Morning Post in a satirical article about a group called the “Anti Bell-Ringing Society.” At the time, there was a strange literary fashion of abbreviating misspellings of common sayings, such as “K.G.” as “know go” for “no go” or “O.W.” as “oll wright” for “all right.” However, the year after the article was published, OK got a boost by the presidential election of Martin Van Buren. By chance, his nickname was “Old Kinderhook,” and his supporters kept the letters around by forming OK Clubs. Soon after the letters also proved a short, handy way to confirm reception of telegraph messages, and OK/okay is now one of English’s most common expressions, usable as a noun, verb, or adjective.

Thursday

DNA = deoxyribonucleic acid (pronounced “dee-OX-ee-RY-bo-noo-CLAY-ick acid”)

Friday

TNT = trinitrotoluene (pronounced “try-nitro-TAAL-yoo-ween”)

Saturday

SAT = Scholastic Assessment Test

Sunday

Chaos, according to Greek mythology, was the primordial void at the beginning of all existence. It was in a state of “complete disorder and confusion” until the first deities were born from the Cosmic Egg that formed in Chaos’s belly.

Monday

Enormous things (including that ship) are called “titanic” after the Titans, the “immortal giants of incredible strength,” also called “The Elder Gods” because they ruled before the Olympian gods in Greek mythology.

Tuesday

Speaking of ships, among those titans was Oceanus, the god who ruled the giant waterway believed to encircle the earth known to the Greeks.

Wednesday

The word “hysterical” is derived from the Greek word for uterus, and in modern English usually means uncontrollable laughing or crying. Beginning with Hippocrates (who, ironically in this case, is credited with making medicine more evidence-based), ancient Greeks believed that a “wandering and disconnected” uterus was the cause of excessive female emotion, as well as most female emotional and physical ailments. Strange and elaborate remedies were devised to lure the roaming uterus back into place.

Thursday

Simple, minimalist living is called “spartan” after ancient Sparta, whose citizens traditionally eschewed luxury and comfort. A courageous and disciplined person is called “spartan” after these famed qualities of ancient Spartan soldiers.

Friday

The “Stoics” in ancient Greece sought to be free from “passion” by pursuing logic, focus, and reflection, though the word is now more used for an unemotional and/or patiently enduring person.

Saturday

Things related to sensuality and physical passion are called “erotic” after the Greek god Eros, who could make both mortals and gods fall in love. Eros was the precursor to the Roman Cupid, and some sources indicate Eros had an understandably less popular brother Anteros, the God of spurned and unrequited love.

Sunday

Calling an excellent thing “the bee’s knees” was one of many youthful terms for impressive things that began during America’s Roaring Twenties. Many of them were animal-related, such as “the cat’s pygamas,” “the cat’s meow,” and “the snake’s hips.” An earlier 18^th century use of the term indicated something that doesn’t actually exist. However, if you don’t mind calling the joints between bee leg segments “knees,” then bees’ knees exist in great quantity. A honeybee has six legs, each with many joined segments.

Monday

You may not want a “nitpicker” around to criticize your minor faults, but you might if you had lice. The word literally means one who picks off nits, the tiny eggs of lice, fleas, and other insects.

Tuesday

The black widow spider gets its name because the much-larger female of the species sometimes eats her partner after mating.

Wednesday

The word “mantis” comes from the Greek word for prophet, because many ancient religions thought the bugs had supernatural powers. Praying mantises, in addition to their pious appearance, can camouflage remarkably well, are amazingly agile, can prey on bats, birds, and reptiles, and move their head 180 degrees. Females often decapitate and devour their lovers (who don’t need their heads to finish up), and in at least two cases, also ate birds during copulation. Seeing a mantis is either good or bad fortune, depending on the culture. Some Christians believe seeing this prayerful insect in your house means angels are watching over you, but seeing one in Japan may warn of your death.

Thursday

Think there’s a lot of insects around? There are. By one estimate, there are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 (ten quintillion) total individuals, and that’s just insects, excluding spiders, mites, and other arthropods. Fewer than one million species have been described by scientists, and that’s out of an estimated 2-30 million total species. Throw spiders and all other “bugs” in the pot, and we’re talking about up to 80% of the species on this planet being insects and arthropods.

Friday

Butterfly wings are far larger than needed just to fly, and their erratic-looking flight is partially a tactic to keep predators from predicting their flight path. The insects generate extra turbulence with their wingbeats as they tip, rotate, and shift their center of gravity around. However, species which are more poisonous to predators don’t need all this trickery and fly straighter than their tastier relatives.

Saturday

Despite being around for about 300 million years, dragonflies put most modern flying critters to shame. They can travel up to 34 mph, fly forward, backward, sideways, upside down, hover, turn almost immediately, nab prey in mid-flight, and at least one species can cross oceans (yes, oceans) of 11,000 miles for the record of longest-migrating insect.

Sunday

Before refrigeration, salt was so valuable as a food preservative that Roman soldiers were often paid with it or received allowance for it, and the word “salary” derives from “salarium,” the Latin word for salt allowance.

Monday

Hence, to be good at your job and worthy of your pay is to be “worth your salt.”

Tuesday

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls his audience “the salt of the earth.” By one interpretation, disciples were being called to preserve the earth from moral decay. By another reading, the listeners were being recognized for their value, like salt has. However, the salt found in Israel was rich in magnesium and hence very useful for stoking fires in ovens, so another interpretation is that the disciples were being told that they were essential in this sense. By yet another understanding, the term distinguished salt mined from the ground from that evaporated from the Dead Sea, which was more prone to contamination. There are many more interpretations, but in modern usage, however, the term tends to mean honest, modest, and hardworking people.

Wednesday

The ocean is salty because of runoff water from land, seafloor vents and underwater volcanoes. Since rainwater is slightly acidic, it slowly dissolves rocks on land, the salty ions from which eventually flow into the ocean. Meanwhile, ocean water seeps into the crust below it and is heated by the Earth’s mantle, dissolving minerals from the crust which are added to seawater. A similar process occurs via the injection of salty ions from underwater volcanoes. And while there are different types of salt in nature, 85-90% of the dissolved ions in seawater are sodium and chloride, same as common table salt, which often comes from evaporated seawater.

Thursday

To remind someone of an unpleasant fact is to “rub it in,” which is short for “rubbing salt in the wound.” Not surprisingly, doing this makes a wound more painful.

Friday

The superstition of curing bad luck by throwing salt over the left shoulder is itelf related to another salty superstition. In “The Last Supper,” da Vinci painted Judas Iscariot as having knocked the salt over with his elbow. Accordingly, spilled salt came to be associated with treachery and an invitation for the devil to corrupt the spiller. The cure was for the spiller was to throw salt over the left shoulder and blind the devil supposedly waiting there.

Saturday

Four enormous hollowed-out underground salt caverns along the US Gulf Coast are filled with oil barrels. These create the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, with a total capacity of 714 million barrels. After the Arab oil embargo of 1973-4, which cut off the country’s main source and led to shortages, the idea for the strategic stockpile came about.

Sunday

Pawns are the lowest-ranking chess piece, yet can still be strategically valuable. Hence, to say someone is a “pawn” suggests they have little real power and are being used by others in some larger plan.

Monday

In chess, a king is “checked” or “put in check” when threatened with immediate capture, such that the checked player’s next moves are very limited. A person is said to be “put in check” or “checked” when corrected, controlled, or stopped, a term that seems to derive directly from chess.

Tuesday

If the threatened player fails to get out of check, that king is “checkmated,” a term derived from “shah mat,” which translates to “the king died” (Arabic) or “the king is stumped, helpless” (Persian).

Wednesday

Able to travel any distance in any direction, the queen is the games’s most powerful piece, and a real-life powerful queen made her so. The chess queen’s predecessor piece was male and able to move only two spaces at a time. When Isabella, the queen who united Spain, was crowned in 1475, that chess piece got a gender change, but could only match the king in moving one space per turn. Twenty years later, when Isabella had become Europe’s most powerful woman, the queen got upgraded to her current great power, enshrined in the game rules still used today. Symbolically, the king piece remained more important, just like Isabella’s husband King Ferdinand, but far less powerful than the queen.

Thursday

Chess dates back to at least 6^th century India, where the board was conceived as a battlefield. However, as the game got bigger in Europe, the original military characters became characters of a royal court. The original Indian pieces, known as counselor, infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots, transformed into the queen, pawn, knight, bishop, and rook, respectively.

Friday

Chess Records, the legendary pioneering blues and rock record company, was not named for the game, but Jewish Polish immigrant brothers Phil and Leonard Chess.

Saturday

There are more possible chess games than there are electrons in the observable universe. (10¹²³ vs. 10⁸⁰)

Sunday

“Karate” is Japanese for “empty hand,” since this martial art focuses on unarmed combat.

Monday

“Tae Kwon Do” is Korean for “way of the fist and foot.”

Tuesday

“Judo” is Japanese for “the gentle way,” as it stresses maximum efficiency with minimal effort, using an opponent’s force against him, and also has a big philosophical component.

Wednesday

“Jiu-jitsu” means “gentle art” in Japanese.

Thursday

The term “kung fu” itself just describes any endeavor requiring time, work, and patience to complete, not necessarily just a martial art.

Friday

“Krav Maga” means “contact combat” in Hebrew.

Saturday

Hapkido translates to “the art of coordinated power” in Korean.

Sunday

“Eke” is an Old English word meaning “also.” Hence, another name you went by was called “an eke-name,” which eventually morphed into “a nickname.”

Monday

Using the name “John Doe” for an anonymous or identity-protected person traces back to an abandoned British legal procedure called an “action of ejectment.” Due to legal complexities, the process often moved faster when fictitious names were used to more quickly determine the rights of the real-life parties, and “John Doe” was frequently the fictitious plaintiff and “Richard Roe” the fictitious defendant. Exact reasons for the use of these names are unclear, but John and Richard were (and still are) common English names, and “doe” and “roe” are both deer-related terms: a doe is a female deer, and roe a Eurasian deer species widespread in England. More recently, “Jane Doe” became the female equivalent of “John Doe,” though the also-anonymous “Roe” made it into the landmark US Supreme Court abortion case of Roe v. Wade before the plaintiff revealed her real name.

Tuesday

“Santa Claus” is derived from “Sinter Klass,” the Dutch nickname of Sint Nikolaas, or Saint Nicholas.

Wednesday

It wasn’t until the year 1066 that the idea of last names really caught on in England, and many last names now common in the US began simply as ways to identify who’s son somebody was (Johnson, Anderson, Robertson, etc.) or what their profession was (Smith, Miller, Baker, Taylor, Potter, Cook, Mason, Cooper, etc.). Many Hispanic surnames also indicate a father’s name (Rodriguez = son of Rodrigo, Hernandez = son of Hernando, etc.).

Thursday

In Western cultures, the practice of giving a child a middle name was uncommon until the 1700s, except to indicate a higher status in society (such as in old Rome) or among cultures who included a lot of earlier generation’s family names, like Arabic and Spanish names. Later, Europeans’ options for the occasional middle name were either a saint or ancestor, but by the 1800s, middle name choices were wide open in the US and Europe. By WWI middle names were common in Western cultures and remain so.

Friday

All living species, once discovered by science, are given a scientific or Latin name in addition to their common name. You are a modern human, AKA homo sapien sapiens. The scientific name of a newly discovered or named species is often chosen in honor of someone and is then Latin-ized. Among the many famous people with species named for them (and often insects and spiders) are Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mick Jagger, David Attenborough, Lady Gaga, Matt Groening, Liv Tyler, Johnny Cash, Steven Colbert, Harrison Ford, and quite a few political leaders and Greek philosophers.

Saturday

In China, one term for “commoners” translates to “the old 100 surnames.” While there are now over 4,000 family names in China, the top 100 cover a remarkable 85% of the population. The ten most common names are Wang, Li, Zhang, Liu, Chen, Yang, Huang, Zhao, Wu, and Zhou.

Sunday

Since at least the 17^th century, people have been saying that a dubious idea or explanation “doesn’t hold water.” The allusion is to a useless container which can’t carry liquid, the same idea conveyed when calling a story “full of holes.”

Monday

Newborn babies are typically wet with amniotic fluid, so “wet behind the ears” means someone new and inexperienced. Curiously, the term “dry behind the years,” for an experienced person, is about as old, but has not survived into common parlance.

Tuesday

A momentous life happening is sometimes called a “watershed moment.” This is actually a geological reference, since a watershed can be a ridge or mountain chain (like the Great Divide) which determines the direction which water flows down either side of it.

Wednesday

“Water under the bridge” has flowed past and cannot be recovered, so this term applies to past conflicts that may as well be forgiven, akin to “letting bygones be bygones.” This phrase is several centuries old, and seems based on the earlier expression “There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since…,” suggesting much time has passed since the earlier event. A less-common variant is “water over the dam.”

Thursday

The term “rain check” for postponing something to a later date, began at American baseball games in the 1880s. Since baseball games can be “rained out,” or cancelled due to rain, a rain check was a voucher to attend a future game in place of the rained-out match.

Friday

Think you can smell rain coming, especially after several dry days? That harbinger scent is a chemical called petrichor. This compound is a combination of oils from plants but also geosmin, an alcohol produced by actinobacteria in the soil. These bacteria pick up the pace of their decomposition work when the air grows humid before rain and produce more geosmin, which humans can detect in petrichor and associate with rain.

Saturday

What causes wet dog smell? Dogs, like many mammals, carry around lots of bacteria, yeast and other microorganisms on their fur and skin. When a dog gets wet, some waste of these little tagalongs evaporates and humans detect it.

Sunday

Fans of “The Godfather” know that the fate of a certain beefy family associate was to “sleep with the fishes.” The term indicates disposing of a murder victim in water, but similar terms go back much further than the 1970s. One identical reference goes back to 1836, and another all the way back to The Illiad, via a translation to “Make your bed with the fishes now…”

Monday

The term “small fry” to describe an inconsequential person or thing does not derive from fried potatoes, but more likely newly-hatched fish, also called “fries.”

Tuesday

The term “jumped the shark” describes a television show which has peaked and is now in decline. This began with a 5th season special episode of “Happy Days” in which a waterskiing Fonzie accepts the challenge of a beach rival to launch off a ski jump over a caged shark. Critics considered this a resort to gimmickry over strong writing (though the show aired for five more highly-rated seasons, and Henry Winkler got to show off his formidable real-life wasterskiing skills).

Wednesday

Fish are indeed slimy, and for very practical reasons. Fish slime reduces drag while swimming, wards off parasites and pathogens, and even soothes open fish wounds. The slime also facilitates gas and water exchange across the skin, balances electrolytes, offers sunscreen, and in some cases gives the fish advantages over prey and against predators.

Thursday

To make someone wholly believe something “hook, line, and sinker” refers to a fish which has taken the bait completely by swallowing this much fishing gear and is now very unlikely to escape.

Friday

People describing a problem drinker as someone who “drinks like a fish” should clarify that they mean saltwater fish. Freshwater fish don’t do this because it would overdilute their blood and body fluids. Saltwater fish, however, drink a lot to balance fresh water lost from their bodies to their salty surroundings, and their kidneys remove the salt while their gills pump the salt back into the water around them.

Saturday

Ever wonder what happens to the fish when lakes freeze in the winter? They hang out at the liquid bottom. Ice is less dense than water, so it floats, and water bodies freeze from the top down. The water below gets denser with depth, and with more density comes slightly higher temperatures. As a result, water deeper than 1 meter won’t freeze, and lucky for the fish, this deep water is usually quite oxygen-rich. Their metabolism and breathing slow, and their body chemistry accommodates this cold, slow environment.