numeral
I got nerdsniped by the development of the numerals we use last week. It’s difficult to find images of historical numerals! This is the best I was able to reconstruct, with the link between the Shang numerals and the Brahmi numerals only speculative:
Photo of a sheet of paper with a table of written depictions of historical numerals from 0 to 9, with the headings “Shang c. 8700”, “Brahmi c. 10100”, “c. 10600”, “Persian c. 11000”, “Andalusian c. 11400”, and “Typeset c. 11540”
(Dates are in HE for easier parsing across the 1 CE boundary.)
Even though the link between Shang and Brahmi is speculative, it’s startling how strong the link is between Shang and modern Chinese numerals.
selfie
While the noun selfie is first attested in 2002 on an Australian website, becoming common Australian slang in that decade, it was not widely used internationally until 2012. The first usage of the #Selfie tag on instagram is recorded in January 2011. By 2013, it was selected as the OED’s word of the year. Part of this was likely that taking a selfie was cumbersome until front-facing cameras on phones became commonplace. They were first introduced on the iPhone 4 in mid-2010.
Google Trends graph for the word “selfie” from 2010 to 2024, showing no activity until 2012, a large spike in 2013, a second large spike in 2015, and then activity tailing off to present low baseline levels by 2019
I was surprised to learn that “selfie stick” was not popularized until 2014; the two terms are strongly associated in my head.
washing machine
Historically, when a device that does a task becomes widespread, one of the things people refer to it as for lack of a better name is a [gerund verb] machine. Sometimes, like with milling machines, pitching machines, or voting machines, they are rare enough that no colloquial name seems necessary. But other times, like with vending machines, adding machines, or sewing machines, the original name just sticks even though the object becomes very commonplace. (While washing machines are often called washers, the original name is certainly still in use.) I wonder why this is, and also what other gerunding machines I can’t think of at the moment.
In conclusion, I’m starting an online petition to rename airplanes “flying machines”.
P.S. I have since thought of answering machines, boring machines and rowing machines. I have also thought about Turing machines.
ampersand
In the 1400s and 1500s, it was common in English to distinguish single-letter words like A, I, and the vocative O (“O captain!”) from letters by specifying “I per se, I” or translated from the customary Latin “I by itself, I”. In addition, the ligature for Et, Latin for “and”, was written so frequently that it was stylized as a single separate character, &.
By 1796, the combination of both of those trends had gotten so common that people started mockingly writing out the spoken “and per se, and” as “ampersand”, which stuck as the name of the & symbol itself.
dollar
The currency dollar has been the de facto currency of the United States since before it was a separate country. Owing to British mercantilist policy, there were chronic shortages of British currency in the Thirteen Colonies, leading to Spanish dollars being accepted and used everywhere alongside. “Dollar” became the official name of the US currency with the Coinage Act of 1792.
Spanish (the nation) dollars are not called that in Spanish (the language). They are called pesos, Spanish for “weight”. Spanish dollars were also called “pieces of eight” / “real de a ocho” because they were worth eight real, Spanish for “royal”. They got their English name beginning around 1581, probably by analogy with Dutch leeuwendalders, dalers for short, which were in common use in Nieuw Amsterdam (currently New York).
Leeuwendalders were one of a Cambrian explosion of thalers adopted as currency in the Holy Roman Empire in the mid-1500s. The trend ultimately began with the Joachimsthaler in the 1530s, named after the silver mines of the HRE town of Sankt Joachimsthal (German for St. Joachim’s Valley, currently Jáchymov in Czechia). So the “doll-“ of dollar is ultimately from the German word for “valley”, “Tal”.