paywall
The virtual palisade paywall is first used to describe a membership-restricted sports website in 2004. The Wall Street Journal’s site had been paywalled since 1996, but this was such a rare practice that we didn’t need a word for it until much later. The Great Paywalling did not in fact begin until the early 2010s, when it became clear the previously dominant ad-supported model could not sustainably fund good journalism. For example, the NYT’s paywall went up in March 2011.
Paywall is obviously a compound of the common words pay- and -wall, but the choice of -wall in particular is influenced by the parallel firewall. Referring to computer security systems since 1971 and popularized in the 1983 hacker movie WarGames (“the only winning move is not to play”), a firewall referred to any system that separated unauthorized users from other critical systems. It settled on its current more specific meaning of a passive deterrence that blocks automated intrusions in the 1990s.
Firewall’s computer security meaning arose from a metaphor for its physical meaning, a fire-resistant barrier preventing the spread of fires by separating burnable things from each other. Uncontained, wildly spreading fires used to be a major problem for cities; firewalls, first attested in 1851, were one of many tools developed and deployed to combat this. The more general meaning of a protective barrier of any sort is from 1907.
checkmate
The interjection checkmate originates from the Persian phrase شاهمات (šāh māt), meaning “checkmate”, literally translated as “the king is amazed”. شاه, pronounced “shah”, is recognizably the Persian word for king. As the phrase was adopted in Arabic some time before 1000, it was reinterpreted as شَاه مَاتَ (šāh māta), literally “the king is dead”. Over the next few centuries, the customary chess winning interjection traveled with the game into Old French as eschec mat, arriving in Middle English as chekmat before 1350.
“Checkmate, atheists”, meanwhile, originates from a satirical YouTube video from the previous culture war, created by Edward Current in 2007. That specific phrasing wasn’t widespread until satirical Facebook and Tumblr pages devoted to it were created in 2011.
weekend
The periodic time period weekend is first found in 1793 as a North England regionalism. It did not enter general English usage until 1878. This delay is probably because instead of “weekend”, you could just as well say “Sunday” or “Sabbath”. Six-day work weeks were the norm for most of history, including the 1800s. Which day was the day of rest differed by religion, typically Sunday for Christian countries, Saturday for Jewish communities, and Friday for Muslim countries.
According to UK records, the average worker worked 70 hours a week in 1800. This number only began to decrease in the 1870s as workers gained bargaining and political power through collective organizing and increased skill requirements. One UK movement in this period advocated for giving workers Saturday off after 2pm in exchange for the pledge to be refreshed and sober on Monday morning. Over the next 30 years, half-day Saturdays went from unthinkable to radical to sensible to policy, enabling the newly radical eight-hour day movement to begin agitating in the 1910s. They advocated for “8 hours for labour, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for recreation” and a fully five-day workweek, which was first instituted by a single US cotton mill in 1908.
Spain became the first country to enshrine the 40-hour workweek into law in 1919. The US did not follow suit until 1940, although Ford was shutting down its factories all day Saturday and Sunday by 1926. The enactment of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which also established the first federal minimum wage of 25 cents per hour, was celebrated on Labor Day for decades. Futurists writing in the 1920s and 1930s extrapolated this historical trend of increased worker power and leisure to fifteen-hour workweeks by the year 2000. Clearly this has not come to be, but average hours worked per year in the UK has at least decreased roughly linearly from 2,257 in 1925 to 1,670 in 2017.
van
The type of motor vehicle van is first used around 1970 in the US as a short form of caravan, which had been used to describe that kind of vehicle in the US since 1962. Minivans, as contrasted with “full-size vans”, were popularized by 1984 Chrysler models, although the phrase “mini van” is sporadically found describing both US and UK vehicles going back to 1959. More generally, van has been used to refer to a covered wagon or covered train car in English since 1820, also beginning as a short form of caravan.
The group of people traveling together caravan has a much older history, first borrowed into English in the 1500s. It was influenced by both French caravane and Italian carovana, both meaning “caravan”, both of which were borrowed from Persian کاروان (kârvân), also meaning “caravan”, in the 1200s due to contact during the Crusades. kʾlwʾn’ (kārawān) can be found in Middle Persian writing as early as the 300s. Although the word can’t be traced back any earlier, we know caravans and their associated infrastructure caravanserais have been prominent since at least 800 BCE.
umami
The basic taste umami is first borrowed into English from Japanese 旨味 (umami) in 1963. It was not widely accepted as one of the currently five basic tastes until after 1985. (I myself learned there were only four basic tastes in elementary school.) 旨味 was coined by its discoverer, Japanese chemist 池田 菊苗 (Kikunae IKEDA) in 1908, from the root うまい (umai), meaning “delicious”, and the noun suffix み (mi), meaning “-ness”. うまい itself is attested as early as 759, but has an unclear origin beyond that.