jeep
The vehicle type jeep dates to 1941 US military slang referring to specifically the Willys MB and the closely related Ford GPW. Willys-Overland Motors, its original manufacturer, had to license its design to Ford because it was unable to keep up with production. Ford’s model name came from a company template: G for government vehicle, P for 80” wheelbase, and W for Willys original design.
The alteration from GPW to jeep was likely strongly influenced by Popeye comics character Eugene the Jeep, introduced in 1936 as a strange animal with magic powers that could only communicate by saying “Jeep”. You can imagine how the impressive all-terrain ability of the jeep might have been evocative of those powers.
Willys-Overland eventually ended up with the Jeep trademark after some disputes in 1950. It merged with Kaiser in 1953, the resulting company was bought by American Motors in 1970, and that company was bought by Chrysler in 1987, which continues to manufacture Jeeps to this day.
A very important cycle of creativity
Nilay Patel, normally the interviewer for The Verge’s Decoder podcast, flips the script by being interviewed in a 2024 episode in which he says something that has lived in my head rent-free ever since:
I also think young people reflexively, and to their great credit, just reject everything their parents did. They just throw it out the window, and then they do it again 10 years later and pretend they invented it, which is great and I think a very important cycle of creativity.
Think of other options
I love the framing of this 2020 blog post of things you’re allowed to do. It’s not quite that everything that’s not explicitly prohibited is implicitly permitted, because it’s not. It’s more that there are unusual things you can do to make yourself much more effective, that most people don’t think to do because they’re never made clear. Like lifehacks, but for life.
More generally stated, try to come up with other options. It’s easy to get stuck in the mindset of needing to do either X or Y. There are dozens of other things you could do that would also achieve your goals that have nothing to do with X or Y.
Do something incompatible instead
It’s really difficult to get yourself to not do something. For most people, “don’t” is a modifier that has to get applied to “do something”, which takes mental effort. Pathologically, if you’re busy or distracted, the “don’t” can get elided out and actually make you more likely to do the thing you’re trying to avoid. Even if you ignore this edge case, it just takes more mental effort to try not to do something than to try to do something.
One way to avoid this problem is instead trying to do something that’s incompatible with the thing you want to avoid. For example, if you’re trying not to snack, you can instead chew gum, which is incompatible with snacking. If you’re trying to avoid doomscrolling, you can instead go for a walk without your phone.
cardinal
The bird cardinal was named in the late 1600s for its distinctive bright red color, which resembled the bright red robes Catholic cardinals wear. The name given to Catholic cardinals predates the English language, first appearing in print in the 700s. It was based on Latin cardinālis (root word cardō), originally meaning “pivot” or “hinge”, but by the 500s being used more to mean “principal” or “eminent”, so a natural metaphor for the most important priests.
I assumed on learning this that cardō was also the root for cardiac, but that’s Greek καρδία (kardía) meaning simply “heart” instead.
You can also see how the “principal” meaning gave rise to other uses of the adjective cardinal, like cardinal numbers and cardinal sins. Courtesy of wikipedia, here are some bonus facts I learned about the cardinal directions while researching. I actually had never noticed before that even in Romance languages, the direction names are Germanic.