bye

The valediction bye is a shortening of goodbye, dating from around 1703. Goodbye, in turn, is a shortening of “God be with ye”, dating from around 1570. “God be with ye” was a common English valediction beginning around the 1370s. Some intermediate common short forms from earlier in the 1500s include “God be wy you”, “Godbwye”, and “God buy”, but similarity in use with “good day” and “good evening” eventually changed the first word to “good” in common use.

captcha

The term captcha was invented around 2000 by Luis von Ahn and Manuel Blum at CMU. Short for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, the word described a technology that had been in use since 1997 to deter bots on the internet.

Frustratingly, Wiktionary lists a first usage date of 2000 but doesn’t have a citation, while Wikipedia claims 2003. The 2003 date is clearly too late since their 2003 paper cites a 2002 paper that uses “CAPTCHA” in its title. This 2002 ACM newsletter by its inventors is the earliest publication I can find so far. Blum’s publication history doesn’t include anything that looks promising earlier. I suspect they were using the term in 2000, which is where the commonly cited date comes from, but didn’t publish anything using it until 2002.

Anyway, here’s a captcha from 1997: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/69/Captcha.jpg

borked

The verb borked originates from the 1987 nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan. He was seen as an unacceptable candidate by the Democratic establishment, who coordinated an intensively negative PR campaign that led to Bork being the only Supreme Court nominee to be rejected by Senate vote in the last 50 years. The seat was instead filled the next year by Anthony Kennedy. As always, Wikipedia has more detail for those interested.

The verb appears in print even before Bork’s nomination was resolved, and gained a more specific association with computer failures in the 2000s, possibly additionally assisted by looking like a playful misspelling of “broken”/”broked” and the Muppets’ Swedish Chef’s “bork, bork, bork” catchphrase from 1975.

orange

The color orange is first used as a color word in 1502 by analogy with the fruit, like with indigo and olive. The fruit, in turn, is first described in English as orenge in the late 1300s, named after the French term “pome orenge”, which went on a journey through Italian “arancia”, Arabic “نارنج” (nāranj), and Persian “نارنگ” (nārang), finally originating with Sanskrit “नारङ्ग” (nāraṅga) around the tree’s original range in northern India.

Usages from 1502 through the early 1600s all say “orange-coloured”, eventually dropping the second word once it became implicit that orange was a real, proper color word. So wait, what was the English word for that color all that time before anyone speaking it knew what an orange was?

It looks like it displaced several other words. Often it was called the equivalent of “yellow-red”, ġeolurēad, like we sometimes say “blue-green” today for cyan or teal. Sometimes it was referred to using other similarly-colored things like saffron or citrine. In heraldry the color was called tawny. Finally, it was sometimes just called “red”, which had a wider definition back then. Elements of this can still be seen in things that are still referred to as “red” even though they are clearly orange, like “redhead”, “red-breasted robin”, or Mars being the “red planet”.

weeb

The word weeaboo first appears as a nonsense word in a 2005 Perry Bible Fellowship webcomic: https://pbfcomics.com/comics/weeaboo/

It gained its current meaning later that year. On anonymous web forum 4chan, “wapanese” was then a common slur used against white people who enjoyed anime and manga. As an intervention, moderators added a word filter that replaced all instances of it with a ridiculous word that didn’t mean anything, “weeaboo”. This did not dramatically reduce the frequency of its usage, but it did end up changing the word that was used.

Weeaboo continued to be a common enough word on the internet that a short form, weeb, became standard within a few more years. It has mostly lost its original pejorative sense.