selfie
While the noun selfie is first attested in 2002 on an Australian website, becoming common Australian slang in that decade, it was not widely used internationally until 2012. The first usage of the #Selfie tag on instagram is recorded in January 2011. By 2013, it was selected as the OED’s word of the year. Part of this was likely that taking a selfie was cumbersome until front-facing cameras on phones became commonplace. They were first introduced on the iPhone 4 in mid-2010.
Google Trends graph for the word “selfie” from 2010 to 2024, showing no activity until 2012, a large spike in 2013, a second large spike in 2015, and then activity tailing off to present low baseline levels by 2019
I was surprised to learn that “selfie stick” was not popularized until 2014; the two terms are strongly associated in my head.
washing machine
Historically, when a device that does a task becomes widespread, one of the things people refer to it as for lack of a better name is a [gerund verb] machine. Sometimes, like with milling machines, pitching machines, or voting machines, they are rare enough that no colloquial name seems necessary. But other times, like with vending machines, adding machines, or sewing machines, the original name just sticks even though the object becomes very commonplace. (While washing machines are often called washers, the original name is certainly still in use.) I wonder why this is, and also what other gerunding machines I can’t think of at the moment.
In conclusion, I’m starting an online petition to rename airplanes “flying machines”.
P.S. I have since thought of answering machines, boring machines and rowing machines. I have also thought about Turing machines.
ampersand
In the 1400s and 1500s, it was common in English to distinguish single-letter words like A, I, and the vocative O (“O captain!”) from letters by specifying “I per se, I” or translated from the customary Latin “I by itself, I”. In addition, the ligature for Et, Latin for “and”, was written so frequently that it was stylized as a single separate character, &.
By 1796, the combination of both of those trends had gotten so common that people started mockingly writing out the spoken “and per se, and” as “ampersand”, which stuck as the name of the & symbol itself.
dollar
The currency dollar has been the de facto currency of the United States since before it was a separate country. Owing to British mercantilist policy, there were chronic shortages of British currency in the Thirteen Colonies, leading to Spanish dollars being accepted and used everywhere alongside. “Dollar” became the official name of the US currency with the Coinage Act of 1792.
Spanish (the nation) dollars are not called that in Spanish (the language). They are called pesos, Spanish for “weight”. Spanish dollars were also called “pieces of eight” / “real de a ocho” because they were worth eight real, Spanish for “royal”. They got their English name beginning around 1581, probably by analogy with Dutch leeuwendalders, dalers for short, which were in common use in Nieuw Amsterdam (currently New York).
Leeuwendalders were one of a Cambrian explosion of thalers adopted as currency in the Holy Roman Empire in the mid-1500s. The trend ultimately began with the Joachimsthaler in the 1530s, named after the silver mines of the HRE town of Sankt Joachimsthal (German for St. Joachim’s Valley, currently Jáchymov in Czechia). So the “doll-“ of dollar is ultimately from the German word for “valley”, “Tal”.
New Mexico
The US state of New Mexico, incorporated 1912, naturally kept the same name as its predecessor, New Mexico Territory. That territory, which originally included what later split off as Arizona Territory, received its English name in 1848, when Mexico ceded it to the US. It was a calque of the short form of the Spanish name for the territory, Santa Fe de Nuevo México (Holy Faith of New Mexico).
The Mexican territory of Santa Fe de Nuevo México kept its colonial Spanish name when Mexico declared independence in 1821. The colonial name, Santa Fe de Nuevo Méjico, was established when it was declared a province of New Spain in 1598. Notably, the indigenous Pueblo successfully fought off and expelled the colonists in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 before they returned in force 12 years later.
Nuevo Méjico is, it turns out, also a calque of the Nahuatl name for the territory, Yancuic Mexico. Aztec folklore describes their undertaking of a massive migration from the north beginning in 1064 or 1065, with one of the starting points being Mexica. By the height of the Aztec empire, Yancuic Mexico was used metaphorically to describe the thriving Pueblo cities to the far north.