q-tip
The countable noun q-tip was coined by Leo Gerstenzang as a brand name for the first mass-produced cotton swabs, created to solve a problem new parents often had. The “Q” stands for “Quality”. Leo and his wife Ziuta were, however, not the first US patent holders for the invention. US Patent #1652108 is instead held by Hazel Tietjen Forbis, who filed for it in 1925.
The Gerstenzangs bought out Hazel and her entire NYC-based (on 36th St, no less) cotton swab manufacturing operation. They changed the brand name from her original “Baby Nose-Gays” to “Q-tips Baby Gays” in 1926, and then just “Q-tips” before 1933. Nosegay appears to be an archaic word from the 1470s for a bouquet of good-smelling flowers. It seems to be only an outdated word in 1926, so Hazel was possibly alluding to that?
It’s fascinating how little information there is about Hazel on the internet. Mark Dominus suspects this may be because if she were married, all her records would be under her married name, which would have been Mrs. Husbandsfirstname Husbandslastname by convention at the time.
boutique
Last week I learned that boutique (borrowed directly from French) and bodega (borrowed directly from Spanish) are both direct descendants of Ancient Greek ἀποθήκη (apothḗkē), meaning “storehouse”, via Latin apothēca. The historical apothecary is, of course, a third descendant.
wrought
The irregular verb form wrought is first attested in the 1200s, as the past tense of “work”. The regular past form we use today, “worked”, dates to the 1500s. Learning this just now got me wondering what people used as the past tense of “work” before the 1200s, but it seems like there just aren’t many English texts from before then.
As with many archaic but common words, wrought still survives as part of some stock phrases, most notably “wrought iron”. In an especially strange case, “work havoc” used to be a common phrase and “wreak havoc” is now a common phrase. So the use of “wrought havoc” in older text, as well as its similar spelling, led people to assume “wrought” is also a past tense of “wreak”.
English, like most languages, has a long history of irregular forms becoming regular as new generations learn the language but not the rare or uncommon irregular forms. This is in part why any irregular verbs still in use tend to be very common, like “ran”, “went”, or “flew”. I just learned when looking up archaic irregular forms now that “leap” also used to be irregular, “lope”, which we see preserved in words like “loping”. “Write” used to be “writ”, preserved in phrases like “writ large”.
The opposite direction, a regular verb becoming irregular over time, is much more rare. My favorite example is the American past tense of “sneak” changing from “sneaked” to “snuck” around the 1870s, by analogy with “strike”/”struck”. (Other dialects of English still generally favor “sneaked”, but American cultural ubiquity has eaten away at that.)
snowclone
The description snowclone was coined in 2004 as a neologism to describe fill-in-the-blank alterations of stock phrases like “X considered harmful” or “Wake up babe, new Y just dropped”. It was judged the best entry from a request for name suggestions in a post on linguistics blog Language Log. The word references the then-popular misconception that Inuit languages had fifty words for snow.
I find that misconception extra interesting to think about, because if there was one language that had fifty words for a concept, it would probably be English. Our long tradition of promiscuous borrowing gives us rich distinctions between words as similar as “saunter”, “amble”, “sidle”, “meander”, and “wander”.
If you combine this with the tendency for many different words to arise around euphemisms, it leads me to wonder if I could actually come up with fifty different English terms for shit. Here’s a go at it:
(Colorful language/breakfast warning!)
shit, crap, poop, poo, poopoo, poopie, doo-doo, doody, dookie, whoopsie, potty, number two, caca, cack, kak, jobbie, chod, thost, dump, merde (excuse my French), ordure, egesta, feces, feculence, fecal matter, anal leakage, defecation, evacuation, stool, bowel, refuse, organic matter, effluent, effluvia, excrement, excreta, dross, leavings, night soil, bodily waste, doings, sewage, runoff, discharge, wastewater, bilge, dreck, muck, filth, slops, sludge, slurry, blackwater, coprolite, fecalith, dung, droppings, scat, spoor, manure, mulch, compost, pellets, bull, horse puckey, horse apples, guano, cowpie, cow-flop, cowplop, cow patty, dog mess, cat litter, castings, winnet, dingleberry, log, deuce, turds, fudge, chocolate hot dog, bum rope, hershey squirts, diarrhea, santorum
I intentionally left off all the simple animal prefixes but found it interesting to consider their differences in meaning: bullshit, horseshit, dogshit, chickenshit, batshit, apeshit
yeet
The word yeet first rose to popularity as the name of a viral dance on social short video platform Vine in February 2014. It looks like the word started getting used as a general interjection of excitement in the next two months, including two viral videos involving throwing things while yelling “yeet”. The second, uploaded in April 2014 (archived on YouTube here), looks to be what solidified the association with throwing.
Unusually, the word died down along with Vine itself before experiencing a resurgence (not along with Vine itself) in 2018, now more established as a verb for “throw suddenly”. Google Trends