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).
vitamin
The essential nutrient class vitamin got its name from Polish-American biochemist Casimir Funk’s 1912 book “The Vitamines”. Funk proposed that four recently discovered chemicals, with the shared property that you get a disease of deficiency if you don’t eat enough, should be grouped together into a single class. His name suggestion vitamine was a portmanteau of “vital amines”, where vital is from Latin vīta, meaning “life”, and amine is the class of organic chemicals they all fall under.
As it turns out, not even all four of those chemicals (now known as vitamins B1, B3, C, and D) were actually amines. British biochemist Jack Drummond successfully proposed a spelling change to vitamin in 1920 to de-emphasize the misnomer once it was widely understood.
Today, Funk’s criteria for vitamins instead define the category of essential nutrients. That is, essential nutrients are chemicals required for human life that we need to ingest in order to get enough to survive. We’ve discovered many more of these since, so for convenience, vitamins are now considered a subcategory of essential nutrients. All of the current subcategories are:
- Essential nutrients that are chemical elements are minerals.
- Essential nutrients that are fatty acids are essential fatty acids (currently, we are only aware of omega-3 and omega-6).
- Essential nutrients that are amino acids are essential amino acids (of which there are nine).
- Essential nutrients that don’t fall into any other category are vitamins.
- Well, except for choline, which is currently none of the above as it was only proven essential in 1998. I feel like this classification scheme is a pretty good illustration of what tends to happen to the first discovered subgroup of a new concept.
It’s also worth noting that essential oils are unrelated to essential minerals or essential nutrients, instead earning their adjective for containing the essence (fragrance) of a material.
Vitamins are typically referred to by letter today because American biochemist Elmer McCollum described a newly-discovered vitamin with the placeholder name “fat-soluble factor A” in a 1913 paper. By analogy, biochemists started calling three of Funk’s proposed vitamins “water-soluble factor B”, “water-soluble factor C”, and “fat-soluble factor D”. The fourth, now known as niacin, was instead called vitamin PP, as it was determined to Prevent Pellagra. It was later renamed to B3 when it was classified a B vitamin.
(If, like me, you’ve idly wondered what happened to vitamins F through J, wikipedia has a handy table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin#Naming)
A Frankensteined history
Today I learned that the 1818 sonnet Ozymandias, most famous for its excerpt “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! No thing beside remains”, is actually one of two sonnets titled Ozymandias published in British intellectual journal The Examiner in 1818. Its author, Percy Shelley, wrote it as part of an informal contest with his friend Horace Smith to write a poem on that topic. Wikipedia has the text of Smith’s losing and infinitely less famous sonnet at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Smith).
I also learned that Percy Shelley was married to Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein in that same year, 1818. One of her inspirations, and possibly Percy’s, was spending the summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva with renowned poet Lord Byron (Ada Lovelace’s father). 1816 is noteworthy for being the infamous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer.
In 1815, Indonesian volcano Mount Tambora erupted in the most powerful volcanic eruption in human history (in other words, the past ten thousand years). Volcanic ash lingered in the atmosphere for years, leading to strikingly colored skies around the world in 1816 (often immortalized in Romantic paintings), massive crop failures, and a subsequent winter called Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death, where the temperature in New York reached -34C (-30F).
Why salt?
The most common road and sidewalk de-icer in use today is rock salt (aka halite, aka sodium chloride). While there are more effective de-icers, NaCl’s predominance is because it’s cheap, which is very relevant at the scale street de-icer is used. It has two primary mechanisms of action: one, the uneven surface increases traction; and two, the freezing point of salt water is -17C (0F) rather than 0C (32F), so at temperatures between -17C and 0C, less ice actually forms.
Salt’s cheapness is extra funny from a historical perspective. Salt was an essential trade good whose importance is clear from the salt mines of Salzburg (literally, “salt castle”) to the Classical Latin noun salarium (literally, “saltiness”), the ancestor of English salary. It’s not just that you will literally die if you don’t eat enough salt; it’s also an important way to preserve food in the millennia before refrigeration.
Salt deficiency’s mechanism of action of causing death turns out to be the same as what you die from if you drink too much water, hyponatremia. Water is the substance with the highest known LD50: an average person has a 50% chance of dying after drinking about 7 liters (2 gallons) of water in one sitting. The least deadly substance known to man is somehow still the cause of most deaths by drowning.