That explains this wonderful line from a discourse about politics in 1855, long before the word was applied to mechanical beings: “The Austrian government has suppressed the robot.” 9. And it’s actually in regard to the Central European system of serfdom that English had picked up the word robot decades earlier. After originally toying with the idea of using the Latin labori, or labor, as a departure point for labeling his soulless workers, Čapek’s brother pointed him to the word robota, a term that, in Czech, is used in regards to serfdom. In Karel Čapek’s 1920 hit RUR, or “Rossum’s Universal Robots” in translation, Capek needed a word for the mechanical beings who go on to world domination in his story. Hulton Deutsch/GettyImagesĪ writer is also responsible for the word robot, but in this case the word was coined not in an epic poem but in a play. He turns off a side street and “find himself suddenly precipitated into the not-yet-repressed noise and contention, and all the garish night-life of a vast thoroughfare.” 6. Melville describes his character, Pierre, looking for a cab late at night. The term nightlife doesn’t require a ton of explanation-it’s life that happens at night-but it is kinda neat to realize that the word’s first known appearance in English was in Herman Melville’s Pierre or, The Ambiguities.
#PANDEMONIUM MOVIE BRITISH ROMANTIC POETS FULL#
The word, if not the full custom, was exported to England, where its hair-specific meaning coalesced. It comes from a conjugation of the Hindi verb campna or champna, meaning “to press or knead muscles.” A 1762 account from an officer of the East India Company abroad describes the process of being shampooed, which was a vigorous full-body massage done alongside hair-washing.
If you’ve ever gotten the tingles while getting your hair washed at a salon, the origin of the word shampoo will make sense to you.
Today, a cop-out can mean any type of excuse or evasion to avoid trouble or responsibility. Louis Joseph Vance’s 1910 novel The Fortune Hunter includes the following line: “He simply can’t lose, can’t fail to cop out the best-looking girl with the biggest bank-roll in town.” In that context, cop means something like get or grab-a usage that survives today in a phase like “cop a feel,” and which may have roots in the Latin capere-“to take”-or the Old Frisian capia, “to buy.” Old Frisian, by the way, is a West Germanic language that some linguists consider a close relative of Old English.Īnyway, eventually one of the main things people were copping was out of further trouble by entering into something like a plea deal after being caught committing a crime. It comes to us from Middle and Old English, and the ball of yarn in question is a handy method for finding your way out of a labyrinth, as Greek mythology’s Theseus did after killing the Minotaur. The word clue is a variant of clew, meaning a “ball of thread or yarn,” according to Merriam-Webster. Maybe we should be referring to equination campaigns today, but when it comes to the sprawling way that language develops, it can be hard to get the horse-slash-cow back in the barn.
Later genetic testing revealed that those first vaccines may have actually been using a virus closely related to horsepox, not cowpox. Two centuries and change later, vaccines have eradicated smallpox from the planet, and we continue to take inspiration from Jenner’s coinage when discussing vaccines-even ones that don’t come from cowpox pus. Note the similarity between the word for vaccine and the word for cow in a number of Romance languages today: vacuna and vaca in Spanish, vaccino and vacca in Italian, and vacina and vaca in Portuguese, for example. Jenner, the boy, and the human race at large, the cowpox pus provided a strong degree of smallpox protection, and the concept of a smallpox vaccine was born. Jenner decided to introduce the pus from a woman’s cowpox lesion into a cut he made on an 8-year-old boy’s arm. The story goes that, just before the turn of the 19th century, a British doctor named Edward Jenner observed that milkmaids who had contracted cowpox, or variolae vaccinae, were much less likely to contract smallpox, which could otherwise devastate entire communities. The word vaccine derives indirectly from the Latin for cow, vacca. Edward Jenner Vaccinating a Child Against Smallpox / Stefano Bianchetti/GettyImages
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