The Origin of Everyday

Sunday

For centuries, doctors associated insanity and other medical afflictions with lunar cycles, hence the terms “lunatic” and “lunacy” to describe an affected person.

Monday

Since most nuts, like the human head, are hard with valuable contents, people have used “nut” as slang for “head” since at least the mid-1800s. The term “off his nut” described someone who seemed separated from his head and senses, and this was later shortened to just “nuts.”

Tuesday

An unpredictable and dangerous person is sometimes called a “loose cannon.” Early cannons of the wooden ship days were not yet secured in fixed spots, but were wheel-mounted and could be rolled to different gunports on the ship. When one of these extremely heavy guns broke loose on deck during bad weather or battle, the “loose cannon” was a clear danger to nearby crewmen, often causing gruesome and fatal injuries.

Wednesday

The word “demented” comes the Latin “dementare” or “out of one’s mind.”

Thursday

If you’ve ever described someone as “going berserk,” you were invoking the name of ancient Norse warriors known for fighting with wild fervor and other acts of brutality. Berserker translates to “bearskin,” as animal skins were often part of the warriors’ attire, which is thought to contribute to the European werewolf legends.

Friday

Many ancient civilizations considered insanity to be caused by possession by evil spirits or demons, as did many religions. For example, Jesus casts devils and demons out of the afflicted in several Bible passages.

Saturday

Cuckoo birds are likely considered “crazy,” because of their repetitive, incessant calls and habit of placing their own eggs in the nests of other birds. By some accounts, male cuckoos are crazy for tolerating their partner’s infidelity and outsourcing of childrearing, and the polyandrous female is crazy because she “fools around.”

Palmatier, Robert Allen, Speaking of Animals: A Dictionary of Animal Metaphors, Greenwood Press, 1995 (page 105)

Sunday

“Google” is a misspelling of the number called “googol,” which is a 1 followed by one hundred zeros. The search engine was named for this huge number to indicate it’s intention to search through immense amounts of information, which it certainly does.

Monday

Your Bluetooth devices are named for a 10th Century viking king who needed a dentist. Harald Gormsson was a Scandinavian ruler who united Denmark and Norway, all while sporting a prominent dead, dark blue-grey tooth that earned him the nickname “Bluetooth.” Early Bluetooth engineers, seeking to “unite the PC and cellular industries with a short-range wireless link” used the name in honor of this uniter king, but it was only meant to be temporary. When the other proposed names for the technology were found to be trademarked or weren’t trademark searched at all, only “Bluetooth” was left for the upcoming launch. What’s more, the Bluetooth logo is the old king’s initials as written in ancient Danish runes.

Tueday

The term “yahoo” was first coined by Johnathan Swift in his 1726 book “Gulliver’s Travels.” The yahoos were a primitive humanoid race, “brute[s] in human form,” who also happened to be ruled by a race of super-intelligent horses. The modern search engine’s name is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” but Yahoo creators also chose the name because they liked it’s uncouth connotation from Swift’s book.

Wednesday

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs came up with the name after returning from an Oregon apple orchard. He thought the name sounded “fun, spirited and not intimidating” and was also on one of his “fruitarian” diets at the time. An added advantage: the “A” word would be closer to the front of the phone book.

Thursday

Twitter (later renamed X) founders originally considered the names “Status,” “FriendStalker,” “Vibrate,” and “Dodgeball,” but a dictionary search encountered the word “twitter” and a definition of “a short burst of inconsequential information; chirps from birds,” which sounded spot-on. It was initially called “twttr” in the mold of flickr, but reverted back to Twitter later.

Friday

Originally called “The facebook,” Facebook’s name came from the the list of student and staff directory and profiles which freshmen at founder Mark Zuckerberg’s then-school Harvard were given.

Saturday

Craigslist is named for founder Craig Newmark, who started the site in 1995 as a hobby after emailing some dozen friends about interesting San Fransisco happenings. As more people asked to be added to the listserve and asked for info on other things, including tech jobs, he created the site.

Sunday

The sky is blue because of basic physics. The sun shines all the colors of visible light on the Earth, but the color we see as blue is made of the shortest, smallest wavelengths. For this reason, it scatters the most when hitting air molecules in our atmosphere, making the sky appear as blue due to the greatest scattering of blue’s short wavelengths.

Monday

Your blood is red because of iron and oxygen. Within your red blood cells is hemoglobin, a protein made of an iron-based compound called heme. Heme binds with the oxygen you breathe, and the oxygen-iron bond reflects light to appear red. Elsewhere in the animal world, blood can be yellow, green, blue, or purple, and in the “Star Trek” universe, Mr. Spock’s is green, because Vulcan blood is copper-based rather than iron-based.

Tuesday

Grass is green because of chlorophyll. Grass, plants, trees, algae, and even some bacteria have the impressive ability to make their own food out of sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. The pigment that does this work is chlorophyll, which reflects green light and so appears green to us.

Wednesday

Water is not blue because it reflects the sky, but appears blue for a similar reason that that sky does. The water absorbs long-wavelength yellow, orange and red colors and reflects short-wavelength colors, mostly blue. Since blue is the color reflected back to our eyes, we see the water as blue.

Thursday

This same reason our sky appears blue also explains the sun’s appearance from Earth. Our sun is white when seen from space, but our atmosphere scatters the sun’s shorter-wavelength blue / indigo / violet-range colors such that longer-wavelength red / orange / and yellow colors within sunlight reach us more easily, and the sun usually appears as one of these colors.

Friday

Incoming light refracts within water droplets while they’re in the air to separate the colors which compose white light, all of which move at slightly different speeds. With the droplets acting like a prism and a color separater, we can then see those individual colors as a rainbow. In addition to familiar rainbows, there are also “moonbows” and “fogbows.”

Saturday

Hair follicles produce less color as they age, and the result is that your hair eventually appears white with no color to change it…unless you add some from a bottle. However, genetics and disease also play a role in hair color.