New Mexico
The US state of New Mexico, incorporated 1912, naturally kept the same name as its predecessor, New Mexico Territory. That territory, which originally included what later split off as Arizona Territory, received its English name in 1848, when Mexico ceded it to the US. It was a calque of the short form of the Spanish name for the territory, Santa Fe de Nuevo México (Holy Faith of New Mexico).
The Mexican territory of Santa Fe de Nuevo México kept its colonial Spanish name when Mexico declared independence in 1821. The colonial name, Santa Fe de Nuevo Méjico, was established when it was declared a province of New Spain in 1598. Notably, the indigenous Pueblo successfully fought off and expelled the colonists in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 before they returned in force 12 years later.
Nuevo Méjico is, it turns out, also a calque of the Nahuatl name for the territory, Yancuic Mexico. Aztec folklore describes their undertaking of a massive migration from the north beginning in 1064 or 1065, with one of the starting points being Mexica. By the height of the Aztec empire, Yancuic Mexico was used metaphorically to describe the thriving Pueblo cities to the far north.
adrenaline
The hormone adrenaline was first isolated and named in 1901. It got its name through being produced by the adrenal glands, small glands located behind the kidneys first discovered and named in 1875. Those were named in the medical Latin style after ad- “near” + rēn “kidney”.
Where it gets muddy is that the same hormone was also possibly isolated and named independently in 1897. This discoverer instead named it “epinephrine” in the medical Greek style after ἐπι- (epi) “upon” + νεφρός (nephros) “kidney”.
Medicine being what it is, Adrenalin (without the -e) was registered as a trademark to Parke, Davis & Co, which was acquired by a company that was acquired by Pfizer in 2000. Consequently, Pfizer holds the trademark to this day. As such, in the US the untrademarked epinephrine is the preferred medical term for the hormone, even though adrenaline is in much more common use. For example, an adrenaline autoinjector for treating anaphylaxis has been trademarked as EpiPen since its commercial production began in 1983. However, in the UK and continental Europe, no such trademark was present, and the preferred medical term for the hormone is adrenaline. Usage aside, both words refer to the same thing.
pog
Thanks to this Depths of Wikipedia xeet, I learned two fascinating things:
- The milk cap game popular in the 1990s became called pogs because of a Hawaiian juice brand short for Passion Orange Guava. They gave away branded caps in the 1970s, which were then an abundant default resource when Blossom Galbiso, a Hawaiian schoolteacher, reintroduced her childhood game to her classes in 1991, which snowballed into an international fad.
- The original Twitch emote pogchamp, which became a global default emote in 2012, is named that because the image is from a 2010 blooper reel of a YT original show about the Pog championships. The interjection became generalized and standardized to pog or poggers throughout the 2010s.
Blinky
A portion of the attract mode screen for Pac-Man showing images of the four ghosts and their names and attributes, described below, in Japanese but rendered in romaji
The best video game localization decisions of 1981 probably include not naming Donkey Kong “Kong Dong”.
In perhaps , the Pac-Man ghosts’ original nicknames, rendered in romaji as Akabei, Pinky, Aosuke, and Guzuta, were localized to English as Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde. Romaji was likely used due to memory limitations; through the 1980s many Japanese video games only used romaji, and through the 1990s eschewed kanji, for this reason. The original names similarly single out Clyde as different, roughly translated as:
- Akabei / 赤ベイ - Mr. Red
- Pinky / ピンキー - Mx. Pink (as far as I can tell, the other three suffixes are gendered, while this is literally just “Pinky”, with the ungendered English dimunitive -y. Pinky is female in all Japanese depictions of her.)
- Aosuke / 青助 - Mr. Blue
- Guzuta / 愚図た - Mr. Stupid
jeans
The article of clothing jeans is first named in 1795, referring to blue military uniforms supplied by Swiss banker Jean-Gabriel Eynard for the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. They were called “bleu des Gênes”, where Gênes is the French word for Genoa. More specifically, for centuries Gênes had been a shortened metonym for the material “jean fustian” in both English and French, fustian being a specific kind of heavy cloth that became a Genoese specialty in the 1500s.
Jeans first show up in their modern form when German Jewish immigrant Levi Strauss filed a US patent for reinforcing clothing with copper rivets in 1873. Their original material was neither blue nor denim, but by 1908 “jeans” were widely known to refer to the specific kind of riveted blue denim work clothes Levi’s manufactured. For 70 years they were just known as work clothes used in specific jobs, starting with mining and expanding to other industries, like how we think of steel-toed boots today. Reflecting this image, they were often called “waist overalls” through the 1940s.
This all changed when James Dean wore jeans in the 1955 movie Rebel Without a Cause, turning them into a symbol of youth counterculture. Over the next few decades, they became a symbol of the equal rights movement, then a mundane, everyday clothing item, with bell-bottomed, stone-washed, distressed, JNCO, lowrider, skinny, and ripped jeans coming into and out of fashion.
The portmanteau jorts is first attested in 1995 but was not recognized by the OED until 2013. (However, “Daisy Dukes”, specifically referring to very short jorts, dates back to the 1980s.) Jeggings is a newer coinage, dating to 2009.