marathon
Considering its long history, the long haul marathon has an unusually short, well-defined history. The English word is a 1896 borrowing from French marathon, coined in 1894 by French linguist and marathon inventor Michel Bréal. Bréal was inspired by Pheidippides, a 1879 poem by English poet Robert Browning that retold the legend of the eponymous ancient courier. The poem established the version of the legend we tell today: a courier runs the 25 miles from Marathon to Athens to herald victory, then dies of exhaustion.
The story of Phedippides has some basis in history. Herodotus, writing around 440 BCE, describes a courier named Philippides at the 490 BCE Battle of Marathon. In that history, Philippides ran the 140 miles from Athens to Sparta in two days to call for reinforcements before the battle. The 25-mile run from Marathon to Athens and subsequent death from exhaustion originate from a different feat that Plutarch, writing over five centuries later, attributed to a runner named Eucles.
The Greek town of Marathon is named for the Ancient Greek word for fennel, μάραθον (márathon). It was likely borrowed into Greek from a local language that has been lost to history.
Photo of the start of the 1896 Olympic marathon, in the Greek town of Marathon. About 50 men and several horses are lined up on a road in front of a large one-story building in the countryside. 8 children watch from the roof of the building.
Inspired by the ancient Olympic Games held every four years from 776 BCE until 393 CE, French aristocrat and historian Pierre de Coubertin founded the International Olympic Committee in 1890 to revive the quadrennial competition. The inaugural 1896 Athens Olympics lacked a headline event before Bréal suggested re-enacting the marathon run as a road race. The games and race were wildly successful, even attracting 14 athletes from the US. The marathon in particular was such a resonant idea that the annual Boston Marathon was held in 1897 and every year since (besides 2020).
The marathon’s status as the longest competitive distance inspired its metaphorical meaning of any really long event by 1909. -thon starts being used as a suffix with the same meaning in 1928 with walkathon. The first telethon was held in 1949; the first hackathon in 1985.
As with most international athletics, it was some time before distances and records were standardized. The marathon’s standard distance of 42.195 km (26.22 miles) was established in 1921 by measuring the course for the 1908 London Olympics. World records are now retroactively based on that distance, so the first marathon record time is 1908’s first-place time of 2:55:18. Over a century of accumulated improvements culminated in the first sub-2 hour marathon earlier this year, 1:59:30 by Kenyan distance runner Sabastian Sawe. That is over 26 consecutive miles at a sub-4:40 pace.
zero
The paradoxical quantity zero entered English in 1604 as a borrowing from multiple languages: French zéro (est’d 1485), Spanish zero (est’d 1512, now cero), and their shared source, Italian zero. Italian zero descends from Medieval Latin zēphirum, which Fibonacci coined in 1202 as a borrowing of Arabic صِفْر (ṣifr), meaning “empty”. ṣ-f-r is the Arabic stem meaning “void”. The Arabic word ṣifr was coined in 976 as a calque of Sanskrit शून्य (śūnya), which also means “empty” or “void”. Śūnya was the word for zero when it was first invented, which you could argue was either Pingala’s usage of it as a binary digit in the Chandaḥśāstra around 200 BCE, or the Lokavibhāga’s usage it as a place-value decimal numeral in 458 CE.
The numeral zero was in use in England before 1604. Before zero, the numeral was called nil, a borrowing from Latin nīl, a clipping of nihil, meaning “nothing”. Scores of zero are still often called nil in Commonwealth sports. And before nil, the numeral was called cipher, a 1399 borrowing from French cyfre, meaning “zero”. French cyfre was also borrowed from Arabic صِفْر (ṣifr), more directly this time.
How did cipher drift from “zero” to its current meaning? The original sense referred to both the quantity zero, and the numeral that represents zero. Within a hundred years, cipher picked up a related sense meaning “any numeral”. By the 1500s, this sometimes further extended to “any symbol”, before settling on “a code replacing symbols with other symbols”, which we can now imagine generalizing to today’s meaning.
The numeral zero was of course in use in England in 1600, because it is required to have a place-value numeral systems. In those, the value of a numeral is determined by its relative position, so the single symbol “2” could mean both two million or two thousandths, depending on where it is placed. England had gradually transitioned from Roman numerals to Arabic numerals over the past few centuries, because of how much easier calculations were in Arabic numerals.
Medieval Italians tried to make complex accounting work in their heritage Roman numerals. But as Venice, Genoa, and Florence developed the first complex European economies, their accountants also adopted Arabic numerals for ease of use. Their source was Fibonacci’s description in his Liber Abaci (Latin for “Book of Calculation”). Islamic accountants had similarly adopted a place-value numeral system for their own complex accounting centuries ago.
Diagram illustrating the Brahmi numerals 1-9 and six of their descendants that influenced European digits, including Devanagari numerals and Western Arabic numerals.
In Arabic, the numerals we use in English are called “European digits”. They are descended from a specific variant of Eastern Arabic numerals that Fibonacci encountered in Algeria. All of the numerals saw wide regional and temporal variation before their modern forms were set in metal by the printing press in the late 1400s.
Earlier, I described Pingala as having invented zero, rather than having discovered it. Whether math is invented or discovered is an age-old inconclusive debate, but I lean toward math notation being invented, even if the concepts they represent were discovered. The symbol for zero seems to be a clear example of notation to me.
Infinite Lives, 1986: Arkanoid
The premise was clear, tried, and true. Break all the blocks. Ten years ago, Breakout (1976) created a hit by putting the Pong (1972) paddle on the bottom of the screen and giving people a crumbling wall to play against for when they couldn’t find a friend.
Imagine if we took everything we’d learned about video game design in the last six years - powerups, level design, destructible interfering enemies, and even a final boss - and applied it on top of an existing breakout hit? Oh, and let’s follow industry trends by making the player a spaceship and putting it in space.
Breakout and Arkanoid also owe a debt to pinball. You keep a ball in play by interacting with it at the bottom of the playing field while aiming for different targets. You get just enough control over the ball to be frustrated when it doesn’t do quite what you want.
Screenshot of Arkanoid. The player controls a suspiciously paddle-looking spaceship in the lower left. Most of the screen shows colorful bricks arranged in a staircase pattern against an abstract green background. One enemy hovers menacingly, a green hollow tetrahedron with a shiny black core.
As common for 1980s games, the canonical version of Arkanoid is the arcade version. With memory measured in kilobytes, the extra power of a dedicated computer designed to play a single manifested as a big difference in quality. The version of Arkanoid I personally grew to love was not the arcade version, but the 1988 DOS port. Two additional years of exponential growth and a game that didn’t push the technical limits allowed for a fairly faithful port to home computers.
By 1986, arcade games were pretty evenly split between not including background music that blared through the ambient din, and a single catchy track for gameplay. Bubble Bobble (1986) and OutRun (1986) are remembered for their iconic background music, while Rampage (1986) and Arkanoid opted for the traditional minimalist approach that emphasized their sound effects.
Arkanoid was so influential that games that used to be called Breakout clones came to be called Arkanoid clones. Its storied brick-breaker battling progeny include the first Touhou game, Highly Responsive to Prayers (1997); FireStriker (1993); and my personal favorite, the arcade game Off the Wall (1991). Its influence eventually faded, with more recent brick-breakers like Odama (2006) and Yoku’s Island Express (2018) drawing inspiration from pinball instead.
Elsewhere in video games, 1986 notably saw the wide US release of the Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo’s rebrand of its Family Computer (Famicom) for overseas audiences. While it successfully sold through the 1985 holiday season, the console was only available in NYC at the time. The NES launched against a remarkably empty playing field. Burned by the 1983 crash, US companies largely saw video games as a fad whose time had passed.
While the NES became the standard bearer for video games in the US in the late 1980s, other countries embraced different ecosystems. Sony’s MSX personal computer saw success in its home country, but came to define that era of games in South Korea, Brazil, and Argentina. In the UK, Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum personal computer became the default game system, while its competitor Amstrad’s CPC found success in France, Spain, and West Germany. 1980s video games were unthinkably balkanized when compared to later eras.
yankee
The mild pejorative yankee first appears in a 1765 American poem, in which it means “person from New England”. During the American Revolution, yankee typically referred to Americans in general. The term’s New England origin influenced its meaning of “northerner” during the American Civil War. Later that century, yankee meant specifically Protestants, as opposed to immigrant Catholics.
The clipped form yank, in evidence since 1778, still means “person from the US” in global English today. The Bronx baseball team New York Highlanders was renamed the New York Yankees in 1913. Their iconic Yankee Stadium was built in 1923. In 1956, Yankee was selected to represent the letter Y in the NATO phonetic alphabet on its creation. Yankee standing for Y was common usage in telephone spelling since 1945. Before that, the word representing Y was typically Yokohama.
The origin of the word yankee is disputed. Historically, it was attributed to a Native American language. A British officer writing in 1789 traces it to Cherokee “eankke”, meaning “slave” or “coward”. An 1822 overview of Native American history and cultures claims the original term was “Yengees”. Today, it is generally agreed that those explanations were false. The likely origin of yankee is the Dutch name Janke, a diminutive of the popular name Jan. The usage of “Yankey” to refer to a nonspecific Dutchman is found as early as the 1680s.
1890 trading card distributed as an advertisement for Kinney Tobacco Company. Illustration of a stereotypical Yankee, a portly fair-skinned man with slicked-back straw-colored thinning hair and mutton chops. He wears a vest over a plaid buttoned shirt.
The Dutch given name Jan owes its popularity to its prominence in the Bible. In Dutch translations, John the Baptist, John the Apostle, and his Gospels of John all bear the name Jan. In the original Greek, his name is rendered Ἰωάννης (Iōánnēs). Iōánnēs was a popular Jewish given name 2100-2400 years ago. It appears in the Old Testament as יוֹחָנָן (Yôḥānān), meaning “God has been gracious”.
Unsurprisingly, John and its local equivalents has been a popular name across Christendom and Islam for thousands of years. Some names that are also John are Ian (Scottish), Ivan (Russian), Jovan (Croatian), Yahya (Arabic), Giannis (Greek), Giovanni (Italian), Jean (French), Johan (Dutch), Hans (German), Sean or Shane (Irish), João (Portugese), Juan (Spanish), and Evan (Welsh). Some common women’s names that originated from John and friends are Joan, Joanna, Jane, Janet, Janice, Jean, and Jeanne. Jack used to be an English nickname for John, but has since split off into its own separate name.
Surprisingly, the given name Jon is unrelated to John. It is short for Jonathan, which is admittedly also a Biblical name of Hebrew origin that begins with יהוה (YHWH).
sterno
The stove-in-a-can sterno has become a genericized brand name long since its 1915 debut. In 1893, Brooklynite Sigmund Sternau founded a company that became known for its portable heating devices. Their signature product, Sterno Canned Heat, was a commercially successful application of an alcohol jellification process developed in 1900. Its catchy name was recycled from an earlier product that had been given the rhyming name .
-o was also a productive casual suffix in the 1910s. Some contemporary constructions include bucko, kiddo, wino, ammo, and memo. The Marx Brothers (Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo, and Zeppo) became famous in the 1910s.
Sterno Canned Heat is essentially a candle made of jellied denatured alcohol instead of wax, packing several hours of fuel into a convenient container. Today, its most common uses are heating for buffet chafing dishes (from French chauffer, meaning “to make warm”; -eur is the French masculine agent suffix, as seen in saboteur or entrepreneur) and a portable stove for outdoors cooking.
Sternau is a German surname that’s likely based on a place name. “Stern” means “star”, and the -au suffix is often found in meadow and river names.
Late 1910s photo of the NYC storefront at 27th St and 5th Ave. The second floor of the busy storefront is labeled Birdsey-Somers Co. and filled with an advertising display for Sterno Canned Heat and metalware, sold by S. Sternau & Co. The first floor is occupied by Louis Berg, Tailor, while La Reine (The Queen) Corsets takes up the third.
The process of adding poison to alcohol in order to make it unsafe for consumption is called denaturing. Denaturing has no other purpose besides discouraging consumption. Drinking alcohol is heavily taxed in most localities, so products that include alcohol but are not intended for drinking, like mouthwash, denature it to lower prices. In 1915, this involved adding the poisonous blinding additive methanol. Today, in addition to methanol, denatured alcohol usually includes an extremely bitter additive like denatonium, and an emetic like ipecac.
During Prohibition in the US (1920-1933), many people did not let poisonousness or blindness stop them from drinking Sterno and other denatured alcohols. Mississippi blues guitarist Tommy Johnson immortalized this desperation in song. His 1928 hit Canned Heat Blues features the refrain “Crying, canned heat, mama, sure, Lord, killing me.”
Thirty years later, LA blues rock band Canned Heat named themselves after Johnson’s song in 1965. They got big enough to play at Woodstock. Thirty years after that, London acid jazz band Jamiroquai named a 1999 hit single after the blues band. Jamiroquai’s Canned Heat notably featured in the 2004 hit comedy movie Napoleon Dynamite.