Blinky
A portion of the attract mode screen for Pac-Man showing images of the four ghosts and their names and attributes, described below, in Japanese but rendered in romaji
In perhaps the best video game localization decision of 1980[1], the Pac-Man ghosts’ original nicknames, rendered in romaji as Akabei, Pinky, Aosuke, and Guzuta, were localized to English as Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde. Romaji was likely used due to memory limitations; through the 1980s many Japanese video games only used romaji, and through the 1990s eschewed kanji, for this reason. The original names similarly single out Clyde as different, roughly translated as:
- Akabei / 赤ベイ - Mr. Red
- Pinky / ピンキー - Mx. Pink (as far as I can tell, the other three suffixes are gendered, while this is literally just “Pinky”, with the ungendered English dimunitive -y. Pinky is female in all Japanese depictions of her.)
- Aosuke / 青助 - Mr. Blue
- Guzuta / 愚図た - Mr. Stupid
[1] The best video game localization decisions of 1981 probably include not naming Donkey Kong “Kong Dong”.
jeans
The article of clothing jeans is first named in 1795, referring to blue military uniforms supplied by Swiss banker Jean-Gabriel Eynard for the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. They were called “bleu des Gênes”, where Gênes is the French word for Genoa. More specifically, for centuries Gênes had been a shortened metonym for the material “jean fustian” in both English and French, fustian being a specific kind of heavy cloth that became a Genoese specialty in the 1500s.
Jeans first show up in their modern form when German Jewish immigrant Levi Strauss filed a US patent for reinforcing clothing with copper rivets in 1873. Their original material was neither blue nor denim, but by 1908 “jeans” were widely known to refer to the specific kind of riveted blue denim work clothes Levi’s manufactured. For 70 years they were just known as work clothes used in specific jobs, starting with mining and expanding to other industries, like how we think of steel-toed boots today. Reflecting this image, they were often called “waist overalls” through the 1940s.
This all changed when James Dean wore jeans in the 1955 movie Rebel Without a Cause, turning them into a symbol of youth counterculture. Over the next few decades, they became a symbol of the equal rights movement, then a mundane, everyday clothing item, with bell-bottomed, stone-washed, distressed, JNCO, lowrider, skinny, and ripped jeans coming into and out of fashion.
The portmanteau jorts is first attested in 1995 but was not recognized by the OED until 2013. (However, “Daisy Dukes”, specifically referring to very short jorts, dates back to the 1980s.) Jeggings is a newer coinage, dating to 2009.
mothball
The figurative sense of the verb mothball, putting something in storage, is first attested in 1926 but only came into popular use in 1946, in reference to US battleships after WW2. Meanwhile, the literal sense of putting your old clothes in a closet with the mothballs goes back to 1902. The noun mothball is from 1892. At that time mothballs’ active ingredient was naphthalene, a simple hydrocarbon byproduct of refining oil first characterized in 1821 that emits an odor that is deadly to moths, and as we unfortunately learned a century later, also carcinogenic to humans.
The word’s constituent parts, moth and ball, both predate English and can be traced back to reconstructed Proto-Indo-European mut- meaning “worm” and bʰol-n- meaning “ball”, preserved nearly unchanged over a period of more than five thousand years.
roshambo
The game roshambo, or rock-paper-scissors, has an unknown etymology, but we know enough about its history that I have an educated guess.
Roshambo was introduced to the US in the 1910s, although it took some time to become universal. One of my favorite genres of historical article, the NYT explaining how to do a thing everyone knows today, occurs in a 1932 article that describes how to play rock-paper-scissors. It’s clearly based on the Japanese game じゃんけん (jan-ken) featuring the same rules and hand symbols.
Jan-ken is the main surviving variant of a category of games popular in Japan in the 1700s called 三すくみ拳 (sansukumi-ken), meaning “hand games with three who are afraid of one another”. Those, in turn, seem to originate from a Chinese game, 手势令 (shoushiling), first documented in 1616. That source claims the game is thousands of years old, which it may well be, but no evidence of that survives.
Oddly, jan-ken was neither the first introduced, nor the most popular sansukumi-ken, in the 1700s. Those all have the same rules as rock-paper-scissors, but use different gestures. The most popular variant was 狐拳 (kitsune-ken), where the kitsune (magical fox) beats the village elder, but is beaten by the hunter. The first Japanese sansukumi-ken was 虫拳 (mushi-ken), which features the frog (thumbs up) which beats the slug (pinky up) but is beaten by the snake (index finger curled). The slug is actually the result of a translation error; in the originating Chinese version, it is a centipede, believed to kill snakes by burrowing into their brains. Researching this led me to finally understand why the slug, frog, and snake featured so prominently in an obscure video game from my childhood.
Anyway! In the 1920s US the game is sometimes called “John Kempo”, likely based on the Japanese syllables “jan-ken-pon” said aloud while playing, where today we’d say “rock, paper, scissors, shoot”. I suspect some kids started saying “Rochambeau” instead because it sounds funny and similar and was a silly name they’d learned in school, that spread as these things do through kids’ folklore, and that stuck phonetically as “roshambo”.