cologne
The scented oil cologne is a genericized trademark, named after the fragrance Eau de Cologne, first sold by Italian-German perfumier Giovanni Maria Farina in 1709. Farina’s perfume was citrusy and renowned for being consistently homogeneous. Its fame was such that it was referred to as aqua mirabilis (Latin for “miracle water”) among European nobility, and it cost six months of a clerk’s salary per bottle. When France conquered Cologne as part of the 1797 Treaty of Campo Formio, the free trade regime it imposed led to dozens of imitators selling knockoff Eau de Cologne springing up, prompting its genericization.
Farina named Eau de Cologne after his place of residence, the Free Imperial City of Cologne. Rather than a German name like Kölnisch Wasser (Köln is the name of the city in German), he gave it a French name because it was the lingua franca among European nobility at the time. The company he founded in 1709, Johann Maria Farina gegenüber dem Jülichs-Platz GmbH, still exists and manufactures cologne today.
The city of Cologne was founded around 50 CE as a Roman colony, named Colōnia Agrippina after the woman who supported its promotion from a military garrison, Nero’s mother Julia Agrippina. Ironically, in every language except Latin, over the millennia the “Agrippina” portion of the name was dropped, leaving just Colōnia/Cologne/Köln, Latin for “colony”.
The Latin word colōnia comes from colōnus, meaning colonist or farmer, which in turn comes from colō, meaning to cultivate or till. Colō has been reconstructed to descend from Proto-Indo-European kʷelh₁ some 6000 years ago, meaning to turn, revolve, or dwell. Other words that descend from kʷelh₁ include Greek τέλος (télos) and English wheel.
Learning how to behave in a new environment
Most of how people learn how to behave in a new environment doesn’t come from reading a comprehensive employee handbook or adhering to a carefully considered set of core values. It comes from watching what behaviors people already in that environment do, then imitating those behaviors. If you’re an established part of a team or a community, you have much more influence on its vibes than you might expect, through what behaviors you model.
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.