draught
The archaic term for a quantity of liquid draught predates English. It’s related to the Old English verb dragan, “to drag”, which probably comes directly from Proto-Indo-European dʰregʰ, “to pull”. The word started referring to a liquid quantity because for most of history, beer barrels were dragged to the customer’s table and tapped right there. This only started changing when John Lofting, a London inventor from the Netherlands, invented the “beer engine” in 1691, a system of flexible hoses that allowed bartenders to manually pump beer from the cellar directly to the bar.
The Middle English word was pronounced the way it was spelled, with the /gh/ sounding like the final consonant in loch, like the “gh” typically was in words like daughter and knight before the sound stopped being part of standard English and was typically dropped. In draught, instead of dropping the /x/ sound (as it’s written in IPA), it became an /f/ sound, and by the 1500s it was even sometimes spelled draft to reflect the pronunciation change. However, some of the derived meanings, like “air current” or “animal that pulls”, predate the variant spelling. While American English almost entirely uses draft unless intentionally evoking archaic language, British English still sometimes uses draught for those senses.
One sense I was surprised to learn about today is the game “English draughts”, which in the US is called “checkers”. In most other European languages, the game is called some form of dames, “ladies”, but in England it got the name draughts, probably because you drag the pieces when you move them. English chess moves were even called draughts for a few hundred years.
Anyway, that’s the story of how I pronounced “healing draught” as “drawt” until I was eighteen.
jeep
The vehicle type jeep dates to 1941 US military slang referring to specifically the Willys MB and the closely related Ford GPW. Willys-Overland Motors, its original manufacturer, had to license its design to Ford because it was unable to keep up with production. Ford’s model name came from a company template: G for government vehicle, P for 80” wheelbase, and W for Willys original design.
The alteration from GPW to jeep was likely strongly influenced by Popeye comics character Eugene the Jeep, introduced in 1936 as a strange animal with magic powers that could only communicate by saying “Jeep”. You can imagine how the impressive all-terrain ability of the jeep might have been evocative of those powers.
Willys-Overland eventually ended up with the Jeep trademark after some disputes in 1950. It merged with Kaiser in 1953, the resulting company was bought by American Motors in 1970, and that company was bought by Chrysler in 1987, which continues to manufacture Jeeps to this day.
cardinal
The bird cardinal was named in the late 1600s for its distinctive bright red color, which resembled the bright red robes Catholic cardinals wear. The name given to Catholic cardinals predates the English language, first appearing in print in the 700s. It was based on Latin cardinālis (root word cardō), originally meaning “pivot” or “hinge”, but by the 500s being used more to mean “principal” or “eminent”, so a natural metaphor for the most important priests.
I assumed on learning this that cardō was also the root for cardiac, but that’s Greek καρδία (kardía) meaning simply “heart” instead.
You can also see how the “principal” meaning gave rise to other uses of the adjective cardinal, like cardinal numbers and cardinal sins. Courtesy of wikipedia, here are some bonus facts I learned about the cardinal directions while researching. I actually had never noticed before that even in Romance languages, the direction names are Germanic.
My personal creed
People are amazing. Every person has inherent worth and deserves a chance to be happy. When people put their minds to it, they can do anything.
A tragedy of the English language
I think it’s a tragedy of the English language that the words “million”, “billion”, and “trillion” sound so similar. The actual difference between each number is hard for people to imagine, even programmers who are used to dealing with large quantities and orders of magnitude. My current favorite illustrative example is:
Let’s say you have an operation that takes 0.5 ms to complete and you need to run it on a large data set. Running it on a million things might take ten minutes, a nice coffee break. Running it on a billion things might take six days, a background process you really don’t want to interrupt or run twice. Running it on a trillion things might take 16 years. Don’t do that.