The stove-in-a-can sterno has become a genericized brand name long since its 1915 debut. In 1893, Brooklynite Sigmund Sternau founded a company that became known for its portable heating devices. Their signature product, Sterno Canned Heat, was a commercially successful application of an alcohol jellification process developed in 1900. Its catchy name was recycled from an earlier product that had…
Earlier this month, I read a more equivocal take about the golden age of a different medium entirely. The ensuing discussion helped crystallize an inkling I’ve been accumulating over the past few years: This is the golden age of video games.
The level of competitiveness varsity was first applied to sports in 1891. Varsity is a clipping of univarsity, a regional pronunciation of university found in slang since the 1700s. The institution for higher education university was borrowed into English from Norman French université around 1300. Université is a direct descendant of Classical Latin ūniversitās, through Old French universitei and…
The enthralling quality mesmerizing is first attested in 1829, as well as its base form mesmerize. The figurative usage of mesmerizing as an adjective for something spellbinding or transfixing begins appearing in 1846.
Decipher an unknown ancient language through fragmentary inscriptions found on artifacts and monuments. As an archeologist from a culture where the concept of history itself is heresy, you stand entirely alone if you believe there’s anything to be gleaned from the past. But oh, how much there is to be gleaned. With enough linguistic understanding and attention to detail, you can piece together…
The grassland prairie is a 1761 borrowing from Modern French prairie, meaning “meadow”. You can trace the word backwards through time, maintaining its meaning, through Old French praerie, Vulgar Latin prataria, and Classical Latin prātum. It refers to a specific kind of meadow often found in French Canada and Louisiana. Prairie dog is from 1804, the one survivor from a family of animal names that…
Wait, a pile of what? “Clade” is a scientific borrowing from Greek κλάδος (kládos), meaning “branch”. It means a common evolutionary ancestor and all of its descendants, representing a branch on the tree of life. Since cheap genetic sequencing enabled its wide adoption in the 1990s, cladistics has become the dominant way biologists classify life.
The musician DJ is first seen in print in a 1948 issue of Billboard magazine as an abbreviation of disc jockey. Until around 1980, it was typically rendered D.J. to mark it as an abbreviation. The less common form deejay shows up a little earlier, in 1946.
Fly a series of sorties against impossible odds as an ace fighter pilot with a team of wingmen. It’s a cliched scenario that had been done in a hundred games. Even in three dimensions, as early as Star Wars (1983). But to match the cliche with another, it had never been done as well as this.
The word for the thing you’re reading right now, blog, is first found in 1999 as a clipping of weblog. Some 1999 usages render it as ‘blog to mark the contraction. In spite of the 2001 dot-com crash, the term spread as rapidly as the phenomenon. In 2004, blog was Merriam-Webster’s second ever word of the year. The year before, rival American Dialect Society had highlighted blog as the word “most…