Your fear of looking stupid is holding you back
Sometimes I think about how if you put high contrast large text in a prominent place, even in a very busy environment like NYC, you will successfully execute thousands of prompt injections into humans. Many people can’t choose not to read short blurbs of text they notice. One that found its ideal host in me recently was a sticker on a lamppost reading “YOUR FEAR OF LOOKING STUPID IS HOLDING YOU BACK”. I love the sentiment and feel it deep in my bones. My fear of looking stupid is holding me back. I want to shout it from the rooftops in the hopes of infecting even one more person.
bogart
The act of hogging bogart was coined in the 1968 song Don’t Bogart That Joint (originally released as “Don’t Bogart Me” to avoid censorship) by the Fraternity of Man. The song’s inclusion in the 1969 movie Easy Rider popularized the term. Guitarist Elliot Ingber used the word in passing when the band was sharing a joint, explaining it referred to how movie star Humphrey Bogart always seemed to have a cigarette in his hand or mouth. Lawrence “Stash” Wagner then insisted they use the term in a song, and the rest is history.
Humphrey Bogart did not live to see his name verbed, having died in 1957. The prominence of the verb is a surprising legacy, considering he was the lead actor in four movies that appear in greatest of all time lists: The Maltese Falcon (1941), Casablanca (1942), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), and The African Queen (1951). The American Film Institute voted Bogart the greatest male star of the entire 1900s.
The surname Bogart is an Anglicized version of Dutch last name Bogaard, an occupational surname meaning “orchard keeper”. The Dutch word for orchard is boomgaard. (The German equivalent surname is Baumgartner.) Both boom, meaning “tree”, and gaard, meaning “garden”, can be traced back to Proto-Germanic and share an origin with English beam (as in ceiling beam) and yard.
geocache
The hobby geocaching got its name in 2000 from suggestions on the gpsstash email list. As that origin suggests, it was called gpsstashing for the month it existed before being renamed. Geocaching echoes the longstanding hobby of letterboxing, the practice of leaving a letter (later a notebook) inside a box along a hiking trail and publishing clues pointing to its location. Geocache is from ancient Greek γεω- (geō-), meaning “earth”, and English cache, borrowed from French Canadian fur trappers in 1797. French cache is the noun form of cacher, meaning “to hide”.
The hobby’s date of origin can be explained by Blue Switch Day. On May 2, 2000, the accuracy of civilian GPS receivers increased from within about 100m to within about 10m, close enough that it became practical to search the entire 10m area for a cache. The first geocache was hidden on May 3, 2000. Civilian GPS receivers had been available since 1988 as a separate device and had become common among outdoor hobbyists in the 1990s, but trying to find an object within a 100m area was not a fun prospect.
Civilian GPS receivers were first made available after a tragic 1983 plane crash where a Korean passenger jet veered so far off course that it entered Soviet airspace and was shot down by a missile. It’s wild to think that a multimillion-dollar jet airplane would have no way to accurately determine its location just 42 years ago. GPS is a US military project that began operation in 1978. The 100m error in civilian GPS receivers was deliberately inserted by the US military from their introduction in 1988 until Blue Switch Day in 2000, to deter adversaries from buying civilian receivers and using their own system against them. The generic term for a satellite navigation system is satnav. The second satnav system was the Soviet GLONASS, which launched in 1982. Additional satnavs are currently operated by the EU, China, India, and Japan.
exoskeleton
The full-body carapace exoskeleton was coined by UK zoologists to describe insect anatomy in the 1840s. It’s from ancient Greek ἔξω (exo), meaning “outer” + skeleton, which comes into English from scientific Latin in the early 1600s. Latin sceleton also has an ancient Greek origin, from σκελετός (skeletós), meaning “dried up, withered”.
Why are exoskeletons not more prevalent in nature? Besides the strict size limit imposed on internal structure, nature must also solve the problem of what should happen when the animal grows too large for its rigid exoskeleton. Insects periodically undergo a process called ecdysis, from ancient Greek ἔκδυσις (ékdusis), meaning “stripping”, where they molt off their exoskeleton, leaving it behind as exuviae (this time from Latin “castoff”).
The idea of artifical exoskeletons takes over 100 years to take shape, originating with Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 science fiction novel Starship Troopers. They were popularized in the 1986 film Aliens, for which director James Cameron explicitly drew inspiration from the book. Powered armor only became a staple science fiction technology in the decade after Aliens.
pants
The article of clothing pants is first found in print in 1835, a clipping of pantaloons. Pantaloons became the common term for trousers in the late 1600s. They are named for the comedia dell’arte stock character Pantalone, a ridiculous, overbearing miser with an equally ridiculous wardrobe. In the late 1600s, this wardrobe often included ridiculous trousers, which took on his name when they became fashionable.
Pantalone is partially a cariacature of rich Venetians, so he was given a stereotypically Venetian name. The name was common in Venice due to the influence of Saint Pantaleone, an early Christian who was martyred in what is now Turkey in 305. Saint Pantaleone had a common Greek name that comes from παν- (pan-), meaning “all” + λέων (léōn), meaning “lion”.
Going chronologically forward instead, in UK English the meaning of pants shifted to typically refer to underpants instead around 1880. The verb form meaning “to pull down someone’s pants” is from 1972. The UK meaning “rubbish, nonsense” originates with BBC Radio host Simon Mayo’s catchphrase “It’s a pile of pants!” getting clipped to just “pants” by 1996. And so we come full circle back to “ridiculous”.
An incredible glimpse at how influential comedia dell’arte was in Western Europe is that the Spanish word for pants is pantalones, the French word is pantalon, and the Italian word is pantaloni.