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”.
New Mexico
The US state of New Mexico, incorporated 1912, naturally kept the same name as its predecessor, New Mexico Territory. That territory, which originally included what later split off as Arizona Territory, received its English name in 1848, when Mexico ceded it to the US. It was a calque of the short form of the Spanish name for the territory, Santa Fe de Nuevo México (Holy Faith of New Mexico).
The Mexican territory of Santa Fe de Nuevo México kept its colonial Spanish name when Mexico declared independence in 1821. The colonial name, Santa Fe de Nuevo Méjico, was established when it was declared a province of New Spain in 1598. Notably, the indigenous Pueblo successfully fought off and expelled the colonists in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 before they returned in force 12 years later.
Nuevo Méjico is, it turns out, also a calque of the Nahuatl name for the territory, Yancuic Mexico. Aztec folklore describes their undertaking of a massive migration from the north beginning in 1064 or 1065, with one of the starting points being Mexica. By the height of the Aztec empire, Yancuic Mexico was used metaphorically to describe the thriving Pueblo cities to the far north.
adrenaline
The hormone adrenaline was first isolated and named in 1901. It got its name through being produced by the adrenal glands, small glands located behind the kidneys first discovered and named in 1875. Those were named in the medical Latin style after ad- “near” + rēn “kidney”.
Where it gets muddy is that the same hormone was also possibly isolated and named independently in 1897. This discoverer instead named it “epinephrine” in the medical Greek style after ἐπι- (epi) “upon” + νεφρός (nephros) “kidney”.
Medicine being what it is, Adrenalin (without the -e) was registered as a trademark to Parke, Davis & Co, which was acquired by a company that was acquired by Pfizer in 2000. Consequently, Pfizer holds the trademark to this day. As such, in the US the untrademarked epinephrine is the preferred medical term for the hormone, even though adrenaline is in much more common use. For example, an adrenaline autoinjector for treating anaphylaxis has been trademarked as EpiPen since its commercial production began in 1983. However, in the UK and continental Europe, no such trademark was present, and the preferred medical term for the hormone is adrenaline. Usage aside, both words refer to the same thing.
pog
Thanks to this Depths of Wikipedia xeet, I learned two fascinating things:
- The milk cap game popular in the 1990s became called pogs because of a Hawaiian juice brand short for Passion Orange Guava. They gave away branded caps in the 1970s, which were then an abundant default resource when Blossom Galbiso, a Hawaiian schoolteacher, reintroduced her childhood game to her classes in 1991, which snowballed into an international fad.
- The original Twitch emote pogchamp, which became a global default emote in 2012, is named that because the image is from a 2010 blooper reel of a YT original show about the Pog championships. The interjection became generalized and standardized to pog or poggers throughout the 2010s.