adrenaline
The hormone adrenaline was first isolated and named in 1901. It got its name through being produced by the adrenal glands, small glands located behind the kidneys first discovered and named in 1875. Those were named in the medical Latin style after ad- “near” + rēn “kidney”.
Where it gets muddy is that the same hormone was also possibly isolated and named independently in 1897. This discoverer instead named it “epinephrine” in the medical Greek style after ἐπι- (epi) “upon” + νεφρός (nephros) “kidney”.
Medicine being what it is, Adrenalin (without the -e) was registered as a trademark to Parke, Davis & Co, which was acquired by a company that was acquired by Pfizer in 2000. Consequently, Pfizer holds the trademark to this day. As such, in the US the untrademarked epinephrine is the preferred medical term for the hormone, even though adrenaline is in much more common use. For example, an adrenaline autoinjector for treating anaphylaxis has been trademarked as EpiPen since its commercial production began in 1983. However, in the UK and continental Europe, no such trademark was present, and the preferred medical term for the hormone is adrenaline. Usage aside, both words refer to the same thing.
pog
Thanks to this Depths of Wikipedia xeet, I learned two fascinating things:
- The milk cap game popular in the 1990s became called pogs because of a Hawaiian juice brand short for Passion Orange Guava. They gave away branded caps in the 1970s, which were then an abundant default resource when Blossom Galbiso, a Hawaiian schoolteacher, reintroduced her childhood game to her classes in 1991, which snowballed into an international fad.
- The original Twitch emote pogchamp, which became a global default emote in 2012, is named that because the image is from a 2010 blooper reel of a YT original show about the Pog championships. The interjection became generalized and standardized to pog or poggers throughout the 2010s.
Blinky
A portion of the attract mode screen for Pac-Man showing images of the four ghosts and their names and attributes, described below, in Japanese but rendered in romaji
In perhaps the best video game localization decision of 1980[1], the Pac-Man ghosts’ original nicknames, rendered in romaji as Akabei, Pinky, Aosuke, and Guzuta, were localized to English as Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde. Romaji was likely used due to memory limitations; through the 1980s many Japanese video games only used romaji, and through the 1990s eschewed kanji, for this reason. The original names similarly single out Clyde as different, roughly translated as:
- Akabei / 赤ベイ - Mr. Red
- Pinky / ピンキー - Mx. Pink (as far as I can tell, the other three suffixes are gendered, while this is literally just “Pinky”, with the ungendered English dimunitive -y. Pinky is female in all Japanese depictions of her.)
- Aosuke / 青助 - Mr. Blue
- Guzuta / 愚図た - Mr. Stupid
[1] The best video game localization decisions of 1981 probably include not naming Donkey Kong “Kong Dong”.
jeans
The article of clothing jeans is first named in 1795, referring to blue military uniforms supplied by Swiss banker Jean-Gabriel Eynard for the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. They were called “bleu des Gênes”, where Gênes is the French word for Genoa. More specifically, for centuries Gênes had been a shortened metonym for the material “jean fustian” in both English and French, fustian being a specific kind of heavy cloth that became a Genoese specialty in the 1500s.
Jeans first show up in their modern form when German Jewish immigrant Levi Strauss filed a US patent for reinforcing clothing with copper rivets in 1873. Their original material was neither blue nor denim, but by 1908 “jeans” were widely known to refer to the specific kind of riveted blue denim work clothes Levi’s manufactured. For 70 years they were just known as work clothes used in specific jobs, starting with mining and expanding to other industries, like how we think of steel-toed boots today. Reflecting this image, they were often called “waist overalls” through the 1940s.
This all changed when James Dean wore jeans in the 1955 movie Rebel Without a Cause, turning them into a symbol of youth counterculture. Over the next few decades, they became a symbol of the equal rights movement, then a mundane, everyday clothing item, with bell-bottomed, stone-washed, distressed, JNCO, lowrider, skinny, and ripped jeans coming into and out of fashion.
The portmanteau jorts is first attested in 1995 but was not recognized by the OED until 2013. (However, “Daisy Dukes”, specifically referring to very short jorts, dates back to the 1980s.) Jeggings is a newer coinage, dating to 2009.
mothball
The figurative sense of the verb mothball, putting something in storage, is first attested in 1926 but only came into popular use in 1946, in reference to US battleships after WW2. Meanwhile, the literal sense of putting your old clothes in a closet with the mothballs goes back to 1902. The noun mothball is from 1892. At that time mothballs’ active ingredient was naphthalene, a simple hydrocarbon byproduct of refining oil first characterized in 1821 that emits an odor that is deadly to moths, and as we unfortunately learned a century later, also carcinogenic to humans.
The word’s constituent parts, moth and ball, both predate English and can be traced back to reconstructed Proto-Indo-European mut- meaning “worm” and bʰol-n- meaning “ball”, preserved nearly unchanged over a period of more than five thousand years.