glamping
The leisure activity glamping is first attested in The Guardian in 2005, a portmanteau of glamorous and camping. Popular usage had spread to American English by 2007. As with many of this century’s coinages, the concept of luxury camping existed before, but there wasn’t a specific word for it. (Maybe safari, but that now has other connotations due to semantic drift.) For example, this trend’s rise in popularity begins in the 1990s.
haywire
The descriptor haywire in its modern sense of “wild” or “disorderly” originates from New England logging slang in the 1910s. Loggers would use the ubiquitous haywire to make temporary repairs, so the term came to mean “shoddy” or “improvised”. You can see how the current meaning could be one semantic drift away from that.
There’s a related term that still means “shoddy” or “improvised”. Until today, I thought baling twine was the same thing as haywire. It turns out baling wire is a synonym for haywire. Baling twine is also used to arrange hay bales compactly for transport, but they’re as different as eyeliner and eyeshadow. That’s what “duct tape and baling twine” refers to.
Haywire started becoming ubiquitous with the first commercialized hay baler in 1874, which used wire to bind hay in the (long since obsolete) rectangular bales you see at hayrides. Before that, farmers used pitchforks to pitch and store hay in haystacks. Its component words, hay and wire, both predate English and may well be thousands of years old.
vinyl
The recording medium vinyl started being called that much later than you’d expect, in 1976. Before that, starting from 1936, the slang term for a record was instead wax, named after the process of creating an original recording by etching onto a wax disk that was then plated with metal.
Records started being made of the material vinyl in 1948 with the introduction of the “long playing” LP format, which could hold 23 minutes of music per side instead of 5. Before that, they were made of shellac, a record format that was still being sold well into the 1960s. We still keep a trace memory of the shellac era in the notion that a record will shatter if you drop it, which is unlikely if it’s made of vinyl.
Vinyl, the material, is a shortening of polyvinyl chloride, better known by its initialism PVC. PVC was first synthesized in 1872, but was not commercially produced until 1933. The “vinyl” in polyvinyl chloride refers to a chemical radical that got its name in 1863 from Latin vīnum, meaning wine. That radical was derived from ethylene, and ethyl alcohol is the type of alcohol found in wine.
shampoo
The liquid surfactant shampoo first became a daily ritual in the 1970s. Modern mass-market shampoos date back to 1933 and Procter & Gamble’s Drene brand liquid, recommended for use at intervals between every 2 weeks and every 6 weeks. What distinguished Drene from its forebears was its use of synthetic surfactants. Earlier shampoos were soap-based, which is alkaline and hair-damaging because of its lye base.
The first popular commercial shampoo was created in 1909, H. S. Peterson’s Canthrox. It was a powdered soap that you’d dissolve in water to make the liquid. It postdates an example of my favorite genre of historical articles: the New York Times explaining how to do something that seems ridiculously obvious to us today, but was novel at the time. Here’s a 1908 NYT article explaining how to use shampoo. Before that, people washed their hair with other natural but less effective surfactants, such as bear fat or eggs.
The generic name shampoo comes from a 1900 Swiss liquid soap with the brand name Champooing, invented by J. W. Rausch. This was named to evoke “shampooing”, a then-popular type of luxurious spa treatment. That shampoo originates with British entrepreneurs Sake Dean Mahome and Jane Daly, who opened the first “shampooing” parlor in Brighton in 1814.
Dean grew up in India and was familiar with the practice of champu, meaning body massage, as part of a spa routine. The word is first found in English in 1762, borrowed from the Hindi word चाँपो (cā̃pō), meaning press, squeeze, or knead. That word can be traced back to Sanskrit चपयति (capayati), meaning pound or knead.
Shampoo is one of those words that has since been borrowed into many, many other languages from English, including making its way back to Hindi as शैंपू (śaimpū).
ox
The animal category ox is an exceptionally old word. It has cognates across many disparate languages, including Dutch os, German Ochse, Welsh ych, Avestan 𐬎𐬑𐬱𐬀𐬥 (uxšan), and Sanskrit उक्षन् (ukṣán). This strongly suggests it is a Proto-Indo-European word, reconstructed as uksḗn, from before the language spread out geographically and began diverging. That dates it to probably before 3000 BCE.
I have idly wondered what became of these ubiquitous beasts of burden. They are everywhere in the history books, even appearing as a Chinese zodiac symbol. Why have I never seen an ox? I was 38 years old when I learned that ox actually means “cow or bull that is used as a beast of burden”. Oxen are cows. I mean, technically cows are the term for female cattle and most oxen are male, but the answer to my question about where they went is “we don’t use cows to pull things any more”. It turns out the ox is a Western zodiac symbol too; it’s just called Taurus there.