jetlag
The condition jetlag is first attested in a 1965 newspaper article. Before that, people called it time zone syndrome. The first regular jetliner service began in 1958, the airplane type named for the turbojet engines that made them possible. Boeing inaugurated the jetliner naming scheme they still use today with the 707. Planes powered by turbojet engines first flew in 1944, marking a 14-year timespan from first deployment to consumer availability.
A jet engine is an engine that generates thrust by expelling a jet of fast moving fluid opposite the direction of movement, propelling the craft forward. This definition technically includes both hydrojet/pumpjet watercraft engines and rocket engines, but “jet engine” typically only refers to aircraft engines. Many marine animals are also jet-propelled, including all jellyfish and octopuses. Before jet engines, powered aircraft flew by using propellers to generate thrust.
Emitted jets of water or air were named in the 1660s through a borrowing from French jet, meaning “a throw”. French jet can be traced back to Old French get, then Vulgar Latin jectus and Classical Latin iactus, all meaning “a throw”. Iactus is a form of iacere, which just means “to throw”. Meanwhile, lag first appears in English in the 1530s with the same meaning as today, and has an uncertain origin. Wisdom teeth were called lag-teeth in the 1610s.
battery
The electric storage medium battery was coined by American polymath Benjamin Franklin in a 1749 letter describing his apparatus of a bunch of Leyden jars all connected together, by analogy with a battery of guns. Artillery batteries have been called that since the 1550s because they inflict battery on a targeted fortress or castle. That violent battery, the latter half of assault and battery, was borrowed from French as legal vocabulary in the 1530s, not much earlier.
Middle French batterie was derived from the verb batre, meaning “beat”. Old French batre descends from Latin battuō, also meaning “beat”. Latin battuō is likely a borrowing from Gaulish, the Celtic language spoken in France before its Roman conquest.
viral
The insidious viral is first found as the adjective form of virus in 1948, while its contemporary sense shows up as early as 1989. This is another word where it’s clearer to track forwards in time than backwards.
We can reconstruct the six-thousand-year-old PIE word wisós, meaning “poison”, from an unusually diverse set of descendants: Sanskrit वि॒ष (viṣá), meaning “poison”, “venom”, or “bane”; Ancient Greek ἰός (iós), meaning “poison” or “venom”; Classical Persian بِیش (bīš), meaning “poison”; and Latin vīrus, meaning “poison” or “venom”. Poison has clearly always been an important topic to write about.
As with most medical terms, virus was borrowed into English from Latin (the language of science and medicine) in 1398, with a specific medical definition closer to “pus” or “diseased sputum” than poison. Russian botanist Dmitri Ivanovsky first described the pathogens we now call viruses in an 1892 article, credited in Dutch microbiologist Martinus Beijerinck’s 1898 paper classifying them as distinct from bacteria. Viruses were first visually observed in 1931 and the first flu vaccine was developed in 1945. (The first smallpox vaccine is from 1796! You don’t need to know the theory before you can make useful things!)
Diseases have been described as viral, as opposed to bacterial, since 1948. The infectious analogy was first extended to viral marketing in 1989 to describe a strategy where you get consumers to love your product and convince their workplace to adopt it, using Apple Macintoshes as an example. Meanwhile, the compound computer virus describing self-replicating malware was coined in 1984. Drawing on both influences, the first time a phenomenon was described to go viral on the Internet was in 2000. It had become common parlance by 2004. Viral video was first coined in 2009.
sphinx
The enigmatic sphinx first appears in English in 1420 as a borrowing from Medieval Latin Sphinx. That in turn was borrowed from Ancient Greek Σφίγξ (Sphínx), of uncertain origin. People note its similarity to σφίγγω (sphíngō), meaning “to strangle”, but it’s more likely borrowed from the language spoken in Greece before the Myceneans took over around 1600 BCE. As a prominent element of Greek mythology, sphinx can be found with minimal changes across languages within the Greco-Roman cultural sphere, from Russian сфинкс (sfinks) to Danish sfinks and Spanish esfinge.
Perhaps the most famous sphinx, the Great Sphinx of Giza, was not originally called that. Its original name is lost to history, although we can guess that it was built around 4,600 years ago, as its face is modeled on the pharoah Khefre from that timeframe. About 3,400 years ago, the abandoned ancient statue was dug out of the sands and revered as a representation of the sun god Horus. At that time, the statue was called Hor-em-akhet, meaning “Horus of the Horizon”. About 2,700 years ago, visiting Greeks began calling it a sphinx, although it had become mostly reburied at that point, until it was dug out of the sands by Romans about 1,900 years ago. The Great Sphinx’s current visibility dates back to international efforts to dig it out of the sands 140 years ago.
The compound Sphynx cat describing a hairless cat originates from the 1966 cat breed Canadian Sphynx, named because its skin resembled the Great Sphinx’s weathered exterior.
shanghai
The forcible coercion shanghai is first attested in 1871 to describe the horrifying practice of forcing unwilling people to become deckhands, most often taken from SF and Portland onto ships bound for Shanghai. Mid-to-late 1800s ships required many deckhands to sail, but recruitment had a tough time competing with the gold rush. You can get a sense of how common this practice was was through the enactment of several federal laws against it across multiple decades. The change that finally ended the practice was the spread of steamships that required much less unskilled labor to operate.
Shanghai is a romanization of the Mandarin pronunciation of 上海 (Shànghǎi), with 上 (Shàng) meaning “upon” and 海 (hǎi) meaning “sea” for a gloss of “On the Sea”. The city of Shanghai got its current name in 1280, with speculation that the city was below sea level at the time. It was likely founded before the common era as a fishing village named 沪 (Hù).