podcast
The term podcast was first used in a 2004 Guardian article, as a portmanteau of “iPod” and “broadcast”. An iPod was a portable music player that only played music in digital formats, typically mp3 or aac, rather than relying on CDs or other physical media. This allowed them to be lightweight and compact in comparison. They were in production from 2001-2022.
guy
The term guy referring to a (typically male) generic person goes back to 1847. This was a generalization from an its earlier usage meaning “bizarrely dressed person” (1836), which was in turn generalized from its earlier usage meaning “effigy of Guy Fawkes to be burned” (1806).
Guy Fawkes (1570-1606) has effigies that were regularly burned because he had hidden enough gunpowder to blow up the entire House of Lords and assassinate King James I on site before he was discovered on November 4, 1605. For the next four hundred years people have celebrated Gunpowder Treason Day, later renamed Guy Fawkes Night, on November 5, burning an effigy of him in remembrance.
In conclusion, if you would like your name to be used as a synonym of “man” in 300 years, you could do worse than trying to blow up the House of Lords, as long as you don’t mind the annual burnings of you in effigy.
escalate
The verb escalate starts appearing in 1959 as a metaphor for an increasingly mutually destructive nuclear war. It was derived from the trademarked Escalator, named in 1900 shortly after its invention. The name Escalator, in turn, was made up to suggest the complementary elevator, where -scala- is “ladder” in Latin (-levare- is “lift”, but “elevate” was an English word already).
hydrogen
The element hydrogen was named in Greek in 1783 for one of its only known properties when it was discovered: if you burn hydrogen gas, it produces water. I’d never thought to analyze its parts before I learned this: hydro- + -gen, of course!
In particular, I love the German word for it, a calque: Wasserstoff. Imagine if things had gone very slightly differently, English had also taken this approach, and we said “waterstuff” instead every time we now say “hydrogen”. Or “smotherstuff” instead of “nitrogen”, and so on…
blurb
The term blurb was invented by comedic writer Gelett Burgess in 1907 as the name of a fictional young woman blatantly promoting his book. This act of blatant self-promotion on the back flap of a book cover eventually generalized to “short promotional quote” in part due to its ridiculous name.