dime
The coin dime was first conceived in the US Coinage Act of 1792, which aimed to standardize the silver coins circulating around the country to the de facto standard of the Spanish dollar. Alexander Hamilton in particular was a big proponent of using a decimal system for the currency, intentionally distancing the new country from the Carolignian system of pounds, shillings, and pence in wide European use since Charlemagne’s edicts a thousand years earlier, in 792. The act specified decimal subdivisions of the dollar with Latin-inspired names: the 1/10 dollar disme (Latin decima meaning “tenth”), the 1/100 dollar cent (Latin centum meaning “hundred”), and the 1/1000 dollar mille (Latin mille meaning “thousand”).
From 1796 to 1853, dimes were mostly made of silver. They were small and thin to maintain their silver content at a tenth of the silver dollar’s. Dimes feature in many phrases that have become frozen into American English, such as a dime a dozen (literally 1861, figuratively 1930), nickel and dime (“cheap” 1879, “wear down” 1913), and stop on a dime (1927; the Ford origin that’s been picked up by LLMs appears to be made up by one person on Quora in 2021).
More recently, drop a dime on originally meant to make a phone call in the 1950s, as pay phones were 10 cents for a local call, before shifting to mean specifically “narc on”, perhaps because pay phones were anonymous. A dime bag of weed was $10 for one gram in the 1970s, not ten cents.
mutt
The dog descriptor mutt meaning a non-purebred is first seen in dog breeding magazines in 1910. The adjective was actually first applied to people, with a meaning of “idiot”, a few years earlier in 1901. It was a short form of muttonhead, which had been a common word for “idiot” since 1803.
Mutton itself is one of the Norman French words that were borrowed into English after the Norman Conquest. Norman French was the high class language to the peasants’ English. One of the ways this manifested is the French words for animals were used for meat, which nobles discussed, while the English words remained in use for animals. Some words for meat with this origin borrowed between 1066 and 1300 are mutton, beef, pork, poultry, veal, venison, and uh, pigeon. The corresponding terms in Old English were scēap, cū, swīn, cicen, cealf, heorot (Modern English hart; deer meant “animal”, as with German Tier), and dūfe (Modern English dove).
pizza
The food pizza was popularized in NYC in 1931. The first American pizzeria, Lombardi’s, had opened in 1905, but called its specialty “tomato pie”. The word pizza is a direct borrowing from Neapolitan pizza, meaning pizza. It was still uncommon enough by 1944 that the NYT ran an article explaining how to eat pizza, clarifying the unfamiliar foreign pronunciation of the word.
The Neapolitan tradition of pizza is a long one, although the modern tomato-basil-mozzarella margherita we’re familiar with only dates back to the 1860s. Tomatoes were still an uncommon food in Europe at the time. They were considered poisonous due to their relation to the deadly nightshade plant. Pizzas were a Naples specialty well before 1800, although we’d classify those items as flatbreads today. The Italian word likely comes from Byzantine Greek πίτα (píta), meaning cake, and is attested in local Latin texts as early as 1107.
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.