supper
The meal supper is another of the many English borrowings from French where our first written evidence is from around 1300. Old French soper, meaning “supper”, is derived from Old French sope, meaning “soup”, the traditional evening meal at the time. English soup was also borrowed from sope in the same time period. It makes sense that food terms from the more prestigious language tended to stick.
Sope is descended from Late Latin suppa, meaning “sopped bread”. I could imagine a food getting named after the thing you use to eat it. The part I found hard to believe is that Latin suppa is an ouroboros-like borrowing from Proto-Germanic supô, originally a form of “to drink”. Supô also has a direct English descendant that doesn’t improbably go through French: soap.
Maybe the synonym dinner has a less silly origin story? It’s another of those 1300s borrowings from Old French, in this case from disner, meaning… “lunch”. Disner is descended from Vulgar Latin disiūnāre, also meaning “lunch”, which is in turn from Late Latin dis- + iēiūnāre, which means “fast” as in time without eating. It’s from Latin “break fast”. Incredible.
fractal
The mathematical concept fractal was named by Polish-born French-American mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot in his 1975 book “Les Objets Fractals: Forme, Hasard et Dimension”, translated to English in 1977 as “Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension”. Fractal is based on Classical Latin fractus, meaning “broken”. Its Latin root form is frangō, “to break”, which has the English descendant frangible.
Mandelbrot, whose Jewish parents fled with him from Warsaw to France in 1936, was a visiting professor at Yale and a researcher at IBM in Westchester at the time. As fractals and their study spread, this dual career allowed him to be the first person to visualize what is now called the Mandelbrot set in 1980. First defined by Robert W. Brooks and Peter Maleski in 1978, Mandelbrot’s access to IBM’s compute allowed him to be the first person to glimpse its infinite wonder. The set was named in his honor in 1985.
Mandelbrot is the German word for almond bread (like a biscotti). Mandel, meaning “almond”, is descended from Classical Latin amygdala, from Ancient Greek ἀμυγδάλη (amugdálē), both meaning “almond”. Brot means “bread”, like its English cognate and sibling.
Wednesday
The day Wednesday predates English. It probably arose in the Germanic parts of the Roman Empire some time between 100 and 400 as a calque of the Latin diēs Mercuriī, meaning “day of Mercury”. The Germanic god most closely identified with the Greco-Roman messenger god Hermes was Odin, called “Woden” in Germanic regions. The standard eliding of the second syllable (not “wed-nez-day”) happens just after the spelling was codified, around 1500. Wednesday Addams received her kooky name in 1962, 24 years after her debut as a New Yorker cartoon. Her eponymous series is from 2022.
As for the other weekdays, they’re all calques. Monday is the day of the moon, Tuesday is the day of Tiw, the Germanic name for Tyr, the analog of Mars/Ares. Thursday is the day of thunder, the domain of Jupiter/Zeus. (I was today years old when I learned that it was not named after Thor.) Friday is the day of Frigg, possibly related to Freyja, the analog of Venus/Aphrodite. Saturday is the day of Saturn, the Roman name for Cronus. Sunday is clearly the day of the sun. It’s much clearer in Latin that the weekdays are named after the seven known planets. It’s so clear that during the Meiji Restoration in 1873, Japan adopted the planet names for the days of the week over their traditional numbered days as part of their westernization project.
The Romans themselves adopted the seven-day week gradually, starting around 50, until Constantine made it the official system in 321. They previously inherited an eight-day week from the Etruscans. The seven-day week gained influence due to Christianity, which inherited its week length from Judaism. It’s really striking that just about everyone uses the seven-day week as described in the book of Genesis today, but if you look back just 2500 years, most people used five-day or ten-day weeks.
myriad
The indefinite number myriad is first recorded in English in 1555, but its usage begins much longer ago. English borrows it, via both French then Latin, from Ancient Greek μυριάς (muriás), meaning “ten thousand”. μυριάς is in turn derived from μυρίος (muríos), meaning “countless”. So we find ourselves in the current situation where the English word can mean either number based on context.
Besides Greek, I find myself using the 10,000 meaning most often around CJK media, as instead of words for 10^3 and its powers, those langauges use words for 10^4 and its powers. I find myriad to be a natural gloss for 10^4. Notably, my parents have lived in the US for over fifty years yet still think in myriads, so I often have to translate large numbers back and forth.
This was most salient to me when I was into a Japanese Dreamcast proto-bullet hell shooter in the early 2000s that naturally used 10^4 for its digit separators. I knew I could easily tell what my score was once it was above one trillion (10^12), because I could anchor on the separator at one cho (10^12).
The other commonly used digit grouping is the Indian system, which in addition to thousand has words for 10^5, lakh, 10^7, crore, and every subsequent set of 10^2. To sum up, when internationalizing large integers you’d ideally use the following formatting:
US English: trillion = 1,234,567,890,123 Japanese: 兆 (cho) = 1,2345,6789,0123 Hindi: लाख करोड़ (lakh crore) = 12,34,56,78,90,123 French: billion = 1 234 567 890 123 German: Billion = 1.234.567.890.123
Isn’t it convenient that we all use Arabic numerals?
…what do you mean these aren’t the numerals people use in written Arabic?
piña colada
The cocktail piña colada is first seen in English as a loanword from Spanish in 1920. The modern piña colada is actually more recent than that, created in Puerto Rico in 1954. Before that, it referred to a traditional mixed drink with pineapple and rum, only occasionally including coconut.
Literally translated, piña colada means “strained pineapple”. Piña descends from Classical Latin pīnea, meaning “pine”. As in English, the word was co-opted to describe pineapples after their introduction to the Old World in the 1500s. Colada descends from Classical Latin cōlāre, meaning “sifted”.
While popular enough to be declared Puerto Rico’s official drink in 1978, the cocktail remained relatively unknown. Its lucky break was when British-American singer-songwriter Rupert Holmes wrote the song Escape in 1979. Shortly before its release, Holmes had second thoughts about its refrain, “If you like Humphrey Bogart and getting caught in the rain”, and replaced the actor’s name with an tropical cocktail that still fit the rhythm. The modified song was a smash hit and propelled the cocktail to ubiquity. Piña coladas were added to the IBA’s official cocktail recipes in 1987.