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”.
blimp
The airship type blimp first appears as British navy slang in 1916. Its etymology is unknown.
punt
The action punt, meaning to cancel, defer, or pass responsibility to, starts appearing in the 1970s as university student slang with the specific meaning of “drop a course so as not to fail it”. This is by analogy to the American football action, where you punt when you can no longer continue. The name of that action comes from the rugby action punt meaning “kick before it hits the ground”, first found in print in an 1845 rugby rulebook. The rugby term’s origin is unclear, possibly a variant of Midlands dialectal bunt “to push or headbutt”.
Confusingly, the term seems to be unrelated to the boat punt, which along with pontoon can be traced back to Latin pontō “ferryboat”, from Latin pōns “bridge”.
parkour
The hobby parkour first shows up in English as a direct borrowing from French parkour in 2002. The French word comes from Vulgar Latin percurrure “run through, pass over”, itself from Latin per- “through” + -curro “travel, hurry”.
I recall the English parkour community debating what made a set of movements “parkour” (efficient, minimal motion) vs. “free running” (nonfunctional flourishes) for a few years, but people outside of it seem to have mostly settled on calling everything under the umbrella “parkour”. This was in the days before streaming video, when you’d have to decide whether to download an interesting-sounding video on LimeWire for 20 hours from its title alone.
As far as anyone can tell, there is no performance benefit to yelling “Parkour!” while performing the activity.
q-tip
The countable noun q-tip was coined by Leo Gerstenzang as a brand name for the first mass-produced cotton swabs, created to solve a problem new parents often had. The “Q” stands for “Quality”. Leo and his wife Ziuta were, however, not the first US patent holders for the invention. US Patent #1652108 is instead held by Hazel Tietjen Forbis, who filed for it in 1925.
The Gerstenzangs bought out Hazel and her entire NYC-based (on 36th St, no less) cotton swab manufacturing operation. They changed the brand name from her original “Baby Nose-Gays” to “Q-tips Baby Gays” in 1926, and then just “Q-tips” before 1933. Nosegay appears to be an archaic word from the 1470s for a bouquet of good-smelling flowers. It seems to be only an outdated word in 1926, so Hazel was possibly alluding to that?
It’s fascinating how little information there is about Hazel on the internet. Mark Dominus suspects this may be because if she were married, all her records would be under her married name, which would have been Mrs. Husbandsfirstname Husbandslastname by convention at the time.