Shocking Origins of Some Common Words

If you love language as I do, you will find the etymology of the following words fascinating. Bankrupt The Medici family, also known as the House of Medici, were the original mob bosses. They came to power through their success in commerce and banking in fifteenth-century Florence. Outside Lorenzo de Medici’s palace and every other wealthy Florentine, was a long bench where merchants sat and discussed financial business with their clients. These benches, called banco, later referred to the business themselves — what we call today “banks.” When merchants went out of business, they broke their benches to signify that they were banco rotto — literally meaning “broken bench.” Banco rotto evolved into the English word bankrupt. So if you ever see a broken bench outside your banker’s house, better get your money and run. Editor Writers are familiar with the term “kill your darlings” — the process of cutting precious words from your writing. But editors were advocating bloodshed well before they wielded their red pen on our precious manuscripts. (If my editor is reading this, your red pen is never evil…maybe.) Back in 175 BC, Romans believed that human sacrifice was the only proper way to honor the dead. But just butchering any old slob without fanfare seemed so uncouth. Instead, they staged elaborate games at funerals where armed men called gladiators would combat, sometimes to the death. As these funeral games became more and more lavish, one person got the job of organizing them to entertain the masses. And what was the title given to these loveable event coordinators? An Editor. Bully If you called someone a bully in the sixteenth century, you were crushing hard on them. The word bully was initially a term of endearment. Bully comes from Dutch boel “lover” and evolved to mean sweetheart. But it came to mean “blusterer” or “harasser of the weak” by the seventeenth century.” So next time you get trolled, just tell your bully sweetheart that you love them too. Computer bug Moths are super annoying. They not only eat your favorite sweater but can really mess with your Aiken Relay Calculator, otherwise known as Harvard Mark II — the first electromechanical computer. In 1946, computer pioneer Grace Hopper traced an error in Mark II to a moth that got trapped in the relay. Unlike today’s computer bugs, the moth was easily removed and taped to Mark II’s logbook. (shown above) But the name stuck. And today, we call glitches in computers and software — bugs. Robot Life as a medieval serf in the Austro-Hungarian empire was backbreaking. Peasants were typically given a plot of land to work until their death, or they had a son to boss around. This system of labor was called a robot. Flash forward to 1920, Karel Capek writes a spooky dystopian play about a factory that creates human workers out of biological matter. He calls his worker bees — roboti, or in English, robots. He titles the play, RUR: Rossum’s Universal Robots. The play becomes a smashing success, and two years later, robots are part of the English lexicon. Hotdog History is fraught with mystery meat disguised as food. Sausages are one such example. The first sausages were called “dachshund” or “little-dog” sausage. According to legend (but still disputed), they were invented by Johann Georghehner, a butcher, living in Coburg, Germany in the 1600s. Georghehner later moved to Frankfurt, Germany, to sell his delicious treats — Frankfurters. Some of these first German butchers immigrated to America and sold their dachshund dogs out of street carts. Now, we all know nothing good ever comes out of eating food from a street cart. But in nineteenth-century America, you had to fear more than just food poison. You also had to worry your sausage might contain some unwanted dog. Thus, sausages became known as hotdogs. Yum. Highbrow and lowbrow In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, phrenology was all the rage. Phrenology is the study of the shape and size of the cranium as an indication of character and mental abilities. People examined someone’s head and then used the bumps to decide whom to hire, fire, or even marry. If you had a pronounced bump above your ear, then you were headed for a life of crime. If you had large protruding eyes, you had a great memory. If you were a woman and the back of your head was large, then you would make a loyal wife. It was also believed that smart people had oversized foreheads. If you had a high brow or broad forehead, you were thought to have sophisticated tastes. If you had a low brow or short forehead, you were an uncultured cretin. It is from these original phrenology beliefs that we get the terms highbrow and lowbrow. So next time someone calls you crazy and tells you to “get your head examined,” just respond that phrenology is a pointless pseudoscience. Bluetooth Remember the days when you craned your aching neck up against a phone while driving? The inventor of Bluetooth, Jim Kardach, imagined a world where our hands could be free. And to create that majestic technology, he pictured Viking raids, heroic sailing, mythical treasures…set in the reign of Harald Bluetooth. Except Jim never intended that to be the name. He just happened to be reading Swedish novelist Frans Gunnar Bengtsson’s The Longships at the time he invented Bluetooth. One of the main characters in the book is Harald Bluetooth. “Bluetooth” was only the working title. The marketing gurus decided to call it Pan. The root word pan comes from the Greek meaning “all.” Now, Pan is clearly an omnipotent name, like pandemonium, panhandling, and everyone’s personal favorite 2020 word — pandemic. But that is not why Bluetooth inventors chose “Pan.” (Technical people don’t get cutesy when naming their toys.) PAN stood for Personal Area Network. Not exactly as inspiring as a conquering Viking king with a badass runestone. Thankfully, Pan was already trademarked, and the marketing geniuses didn’t realize it until the product was about to be unveiled. So they said…screw it. Let’s just go with the king with the blue teeth. Etiquette Words often are born out of necessity. And no one needed his ill-mannered friends to behave more than King Louis XIV of France. Every time Louis’ courtiers came over to the palace, they would trample the lawn, throw trash everywhere, frolic in the shrubbery, and pee in the fountains. So Louis had the brilliant idea to place little signs or “etiquettes” all over the palace grounds telling people how to behave. And it actually worked. The lawns looked greener, the fountains looked less yellowish, and the shrubbery….well, let’s just say that there was a reason why it was so tall. The word etiquette was later adopted into the English language and came to mean the code of polite behavior no one seems to follow anymore.