4. b) to strand, as on a desolate island. In the 1720s, maroon was an English term for the black slaves who had escaped to live in the wild in the West Indies and Guiana (in northwestern South America). The name spread to other communities of fugitive slaves, as well as their descendants, who are still called Maroon people in some parts of the world today. (Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote about the Maroons who lived in a swampy region in Virginia and North Carolina in her 1856 novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp.) That meaning for maroon is thought to have its origin in the Spanish word cimarrón, meaning “wild” or “untamed.” The color maroon: That came into English in the 1790s, derived from the French marron, for “chestnut.”
5. b) marshy land. The marshy moor came very early, before the year 1200, from the Old English word mor, meaning “morass” or “swamp.” The Moor that refers to North Africans entered the English language in the late 1400s and comes from the Latin Maurus, for “inhabitant of Mauretania,” an ancient African kingdom on the shores of the Mediterranean in what is now Morocco and part of western Algeria. (The modern nation of Mauritania, which lies to the southwest and on the Atlantic coast, was named after the ancient kingdom of the Moors.)
6. a) a whale’s tail. In the 1720s, people started calling the whale’s tail a fluke, which was derived from the term for the flared part of a ship’s anchor—the part meant to dig into the sea floor—which has been called a fluke since the 1500s. (That word is believed to have its root in the German flügel, meaning “wing.”) The lucky fluke: The earliest known reference to that meaning came in 1857, referring specifically to a lucky stroke in a game of billiards, although it can now apply to anything. Where that came from, no one knows.
7. a) hunters’ prey. In the good old days, when a hunter bagged a buck or some other creature, he gutted it and placed some of its entrails on the animal’s hide—for the dogs that had helped on the hunt. The name for the entrails: qurrie, which became quarry in the early 1300s. (Quirre comes from the Latin cor, meaning “heart.”) The quarry where rocks are mined entered the language around 1400, from the Middle Latin quarreria, which meant “place where stones are squared,” which goes back to the Latin quadrare, meaning “to square,” referring to the process of chiseling rock into squarish shapes for building.
8. a) freezing rain. The frozen hail came to us in the 1100s, from the Old English word of the same meaning, hægl. That word is believed to have been derived from a very ancient Proto-Indo-European word kaghlo, meaning “pebble.” The hail that means “to call from afar” arrived in the 1560s, its roots going back to the Old Norse heill, a greeting meaning “health,” or “prosperity.”
9. a) to sell or peddle. This meaning of hawk came to English in the late 1400s, as a back-formation of the older noun hawker, for a street vendor, which goes back to the Germanic höken, meaning “carry on the back.” To hawk up loogies—that came in the 1580s. It was onomatopoeic: It sounds like “hawwwwk.”
10. b) to release a switch or catch. Trip as in “trip a switch” was first used in the late 1890s, and was simply an imaginative use of the verb “to trip” as in catch your foot on something and stumble. Trip as in “Oh, wow, man…” entered the language in the late 1950s.
11. b) a cheer (“Hip hip hooray!”). The happy hip was coined in the 1820s, and is believed to come from the German hepp, a call made by hunters before attacking their quarry. The other meaning of hip came in the first decade of the 1900s, from an earlier word with the same meaning—hep. The origin of that word: unknown. Both were born as part of African-American slang; “hip” took over from “hep” completely by the 1950s.
12. a) a munitions storehouse. Magazines have been used for ammo since the 1580s, the root of this meaning going back to the old Arabic makhazin, meaning “storehouse.” Magazines have been for reading (in the john!) since the very first one—The Gentleman’s Magazine—was published in London in 1731. Publisher Edward Cave saw it as a “storehouse” for information.
13. a) an embalmed body. Mummy became an English word in the 1610s, from the Latin mumia, which came from the Arabic mumiyah, both meaning “embalmed body.” (The word first entered English in the 1400s, but it meant “medicine made from an embalmed body.” That’s because back in those days mummies were ground into powder and sold as a medicine to be eaten. Mummy as a pet name for Mom didn’t come along until the 1820s.
14. b) a person hired to carry. Porter, as in hotel porter, came from the Latin portare, meaning “to carry,” in the 1200s. The dark beer became porter, after the hard-working porter 500 years later, in the 1720s.
15. b) to crush. You could first squash something (like a bug) in the 1560s, the root of the word being the Latin quassare, meaning “to shatter.” The tasty squash was taken from the Narragansett people around Rhode Island in the 1640s. Their name for this food was askutasquash, a combination of their words askut, meaning “green or raw,” and asquash, meaning “eaten.”
16. a) an American. The earliest known shortening of “Yankee” to Yank was in 1778. The verb yank: 1822. And it appears to have been yanked out of nowhere: Its origin is unknown.
NAME THAT PRESIDENT
(Answers for page 405)
1. President Obama, 2011
2. President Obama, 2012
3. President Bush (Sr.), 1991
4. President Clinton, 1999
5. President Bush, 2004
6. President Bush, 2003
7. President Clinton, 1999
8. President Nixon, 1969
9. President Obama, 2012
10. President Carter, 1980
11. President Bush (Sr.), 1989
12. President Carter, 1980
13. President Bush (Sr.), 1992
14. Presidents George H.W. Bush (1991) and Bill Clinton (2002). Clinton upped the honor by awarding it “with distinction.”
* * *
IMPOSSIBLE QUESTIONS WEIRD TIME EDITION
1. What day is most likely to be the longest day of the year?
Answer: December 31. If you said June 20 or 21 (the Northern Hemisphere’s Summer Solstice), you’d be right…if we were talking about the longest amount of daylight in the year. We’re not: Despite the extra sunlight, those days are 24 hours long, just like every other day in a normal year. But not every year is normal. As astronomy and time measurement have become increasingly precise, official time gradually gets out of sync with the earth’s rotation. Additions of “leap seconds” are required now and again to stay accurate. The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service added 25 of them between 1972 and 2012. Fifteen “24:00:01 days” took place on December 31; ten, on June 30.
2. If you planned to drink a root beer for every hour it’s your birthday somewhere on Earth, how many cans should you buy?
Answer: Forty-eight. If you started celebrating just west of the International Dateline, you could celebrate for 24 hours. Then at midnight you could step eastward over the Dateline, lose a day, and celebrate your birthday all over again for a total of 48 hours.
Charles Dickens made as much money from his lectures as he did from his 20 novels.
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Keep on flushin’!
Uncle John's Fully Loaded 25th Anniversary Bathroom Reader (Uncle John's Bathroom Reader) Page 69
