WORD ORIGINS
Ever wonder where words come from? So do we!
SHENANIGANS
Meaning: High-spirited or mischievous activity
Origin: This fun word first appeared in 1855 in Town Talk, a San Francisco newspaper, meaning something like “funny business.” (“Are you quite sure? No shenanigan?” it read.) In the 1920s, it began to be used in the plural—shenanigans—with a lighter meaning—“tomfoolery.” Three theories of its origin: It came from the Irish Gaelic sionnachuighim (pronounced something like “shenanigan”), meaning “I play tricks”; or from the Spanish chanada, a short form of charranada, meaning “trick” or “deceit”; or from a German slang word for “work”—schinäglen.
TROPHY
Meaning: An object given as a prize for winning a competition
Origin: From the old Greek word trope, which meant the “turning point” in a battle. The Greeks used to erect monuments at the exact spot on a battlefield where the tide had turned in their favor. Over the centuries, the word evolved to represent any battle monument, whether or not it was on a battlefield, and even if it just commemorated a sporting victory.
JERKY
Meaning: Dried or cured meat
Origin: It comes from the Quechua language, spoken in the Andes region of South America since before the time of the Incas. Their word ch’arki means “dried flesh.” Spanish explorers, possibly as early as the 1500s, borrowed it and it became the Spanish word charqui. That migrated to English, and by the 1840s it had become jerky.
POLLUTION
Meaning: Impurities in the air and water
Origin: The Latin word polluere meant “to soil, defile, or contaminate.” In Late Latin, the word changed to pollutionenem and took on a very naughty connotation, meaning (cover your children’s ears) “a discharge of semen other than during sex.” It entered English as pollution in 1340, but didn’t take on its modern meaning—“polluting the environment”—until the 1950s.
SLANG
Meaning: Informal language
Origin: The word first showed up in English in the mid-1700s, meaning a “secret language of thieves.” Some etymologists theorize that it’s a derivation of the Norse slengja kjeften, literally “to sling the jaw,” or “to abuse with words,” but its true origin is unknown.
TANK
Meaning: An armored military vehicle that moves on tracks
Origin: During World War I, the British military started working on a new specialized combat vehicle. The project was so top-secret that the workers who were making the vehicles didn’t even know what they were—the government told them that they’d be used to carry water during desert operations. The workers called them “water carriers”…until someone pointed out that the name could be abbreviated to “WC”—meaning “water-closet” or “toilet.” So they started calling them “water tanks,” and then just “tanks.” (Tanks made their combat debut at the Battle of the Somme in northern France in September 1916.)
GLOBAL WARMING
Meaning: A gradual increase in Earth’s average temperatures
Origin: This phrase was coined in 1975 by environmental scientist Wallace Broecker, now a professor at Columbia University, in a paper entitled “Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” It referred to what climatologists view as the current period of warmer overall temperatures on Earth due to human activity. Many scientists regret that this phrase has become so popular and prefer to use “climate change,” as the overriding belief is that some parts of Earth will actually become colder during this period.
GIDDY
Meaning: Being excited nearly to the point of disorientation
Origin: These days, we associate being giddy with being silly or in love. But at one time, being giddy could have gotten you locked up. It first appeared in Old English as the word gydig, meaning “insane” or “possessed.” The root of giddy is, in fact, the same Germanic root that gave us the English word “god”—and originally, to be giddy was to be possessed by a god or other supernatural being.
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