williwaw

There are a good number of words and names that we just don’t know an origin. One example is the odd word "williwaw."

Williwaw is used to describe a sudden violent gust of cold land air, most common along mountainous coasts of high latitudes. It is also used more generally to mean a sudden violent wind, and figuratively for a violent commotion.

We know that the word was first used by 19th-century British writers who may have picked it up from British sailors and seal hunters. But I also found an origin being Native American origin or invented or adopted by European sailors and fishermen who encountered the fierce winds off North America’s northwest coast and in the Strait of Magellan at the southern tip of South America.

The word is still used today when unsuspecting sailors or pilots encounter these winds that seem to come out of nowhere. 

Beachcombing

Nuva Hiva French Polynesia Marquesas Islands

I wrote a poem called "Beachcombing" after I had read, much to my surprise, that the first appearance of the word “beachcombers” in print was in Herman Melville’s memoir Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas in 1847. 

Melville used the term to describe a population of Europeans who lived in South Pacific islands, “combing” the beach and nearby waters for flotsam, jetsam, or anything else they could use or trade. We use the term in the same way today - though for less serious beachcombing for things like seashells.

That book was a follow-up to the commercial and critical success of his first book, Typee. It continued his tales of South Sea adventure-romances. Omoo is named after the Polynesian term for a rover, or someone who roams from island to island.

Omoo is about the events aboard a South Sea whaling vessel. It is based on Melville’s personal experiences as a crew member on a ship sailing the Pacific. They did recruiting among the natives for sailors. They dealt with deserters and even mutiny.

Melville's first-person account of life as a sailor during the nineteenth century and the exotic locales in Polynesia made the books popular. The two books found much greater success and sales than the later books, including his masterpiece, Moby-Dick.

Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life was Melville's first book, published in the early part of 1846. Melville was 26 years old. It is itself a minor classic of the travel and adventure genre. From it, Melville became known as the "man who lived among the cannibals."

It is about his time on the island Nuku Hiva in the South Pacific Marquesas Islands. Melville "supplemented" the story with some "imaginative reconstruction" and research from other books, as he did in most of his non-fiction and fiction. "Typee" comes from the valley of Taipivai, once known as Taipei. It was his most popular work during his lifetime.

I am not suggesting that Melville made up his adventures. Many of the events in the book were corroborated by Melville's fellow castaway, Richard Tobias Greene ("Toby") and an affidavit from the ship's captain corroborated that both of them did desert ship on the island in the summer of 1842.

The research is described by Melville as a way to supplement his lack of knowledge beyond his first-hnd experiences about the island culture and language.

The String Cheese Incident

The String Cheese Incident is one of the more unusual band names. Right up front, I will say that I haven't found a definitive answer on the name's origin, but there are some interesting theories.

The band started in Crested Butte, Colorado in 1993. They are hard to pin down to one musical genre. They are often called a "jam band" and their music can be progressive bluegrass, country, neo-psychedelia, or some hybrid. 

In 1993, there was a band in Crested Butte, Colorado briefly called the Blue String Cheese Band, who became the String Cheese Conspiracy for a very short time. Those are supposedly earlier forms of The String Cheese Incident.

Like some other bands, this band does not say how the name came to be. Mystery. My favorite of the origin stories is that they had a run-in with the law enforcement in a traffic stop. They had some magic mushrooms but when questioned about what was in the bag, they claimed it was "string cheese." String cheese (which is mozzarella cheese) and mushrooms don't look at all similar but the story was believed. This became "the string cheese incident."

I also saw online several people who claimed the name comes from a running gag in the comic Calvin and Hobbes. But that has been refuted though the comic had a running joke about a "noodle incident."

The band's gigs became known as "incidents." One of their albums is called Rhythm Of The Road: Volume One, Incident In Atlanta -11.17.00 .

There are no confirmations or refutations on their official website at stringcheeseincident.com

The band has a cultish following that records and shares recordings of all their shows, much like the Phish and Grateful Dead fans.

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Cleveland Guardians

A fresh look from the 216. pic.twitter.com/0W8VTtZ7b0

— Cleveland Indians (@Indians) July 23, 2021

 Another team has announced that they are changing their team branding - name, logo, mascot - so that it does not offend Native American Indians.

The Cleveland Indians are playing their final season this year under that name and once the season ends they will be known as the Cleveland Guardians.

Why "Guardians?" The "Guardians of Traffic" are 43-foot statues that have stood on the Hope Memorial Bridge for almost 100 years. In a promotional video announcement (narrated by Tom Hanks) you can see the statues and beyond them is the team's Progressive Field. How do they represent Cleveland or baseball? According to the franchise, the Guardians of Traffic symbolize the spirit of progress. "We are excited to usher in the next era of the deep history of baseball in Cleveland," owner Paul Dolan said in a press release.

And why Tom Hanks? Besides him being a beloved actor and voice we trust, he has been a fan of the Cleveland baseball franchise since the late 1970's when he was a young actor interning at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival.

 

Oh, and that 216 reference? Check here.

Astroturfing

Astroturf is something that most people associate with the artificial grass (turf) that is often used on sports fields. But astroturfing - the verb - is something quite different. 

Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization. It is when a message that is political, advertising, religious, or part of public relations is made to appear as though it originates from and is supported by "grassroots" participants. It is an attempt - a deceptive one - to give messages or organizations credibility by withholding information about the source's financial connection(s). 

The original AstroTurf is a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to resemble natural grass. Astroturfingplays off the "grassroots" idea that the message wants to seem "true" or "natural" rather than "fake" or "artificial."

An example of the practice came in response to the passage of tobacco control legislation in the U.S. Tobacco companies including Philip Morris, Burson-Marsteller and others created the National Smokers Alliance (NSA) in 1993 which was an aggressive public relations campaign that ran until 1999 and attempted to inflate the amount of grassroots support for smoker's rights that existed. 

In 2010, the Federal Trade Commission settled a complaint with Reverb Communications, which was using interns to post favorable product reviews in Apple's iTunes store for their clients.

Slang for Money

Slang words used to mean money have been around for a very long time and there are too many to cover in any detail here, but here are some of my favorites. 

The term that caught my attention recently that I couldn't figure out is cheddar. As slang for money, the term seemed new to me, but it is not new. At the end of WWII, welfare recipients received parcels of cheese as part of their benefits. The practice continued into the 1970s and the giving out of government surplus cheese was connected by recipients with the money they received.

Another food term is bacon. as in “bringing home the bacon.” One origin story places the phrase in the 1100s in Great Dunmow, England. According to local legend, the church in town would award a side of bacon (called a “flitch") to any man who could honestly say that he had not argued with his wife for a year and a day. Any such man would “bring home the bacon" and be considered a role model.

Another story is from the 1500s coming from country fairs and greased pig competitions. If you were the one who could catch that slippery pig, you got to keep it and so you got to “bring home the bacon."

And then some sources say it is much more modern dating back only to the early 20th century. At the time, bacon was used to refer not only to the strips we know today but to all pork, in general. The word "bacon" comes from old German and French words for “back," since the best cuts of pork come from the back and sides of the animal. 

Green as slang for money is a reference to the color of American money. An older term was greenback which was used to refer to American currency printed in the Civil War. The front of the bill was printed in black while the back was printed in green.

The slang term C note references that "C" equals 100 in the Roman numeral system and stands for the Latin word centum, which means “a hundred.” The Latin also gave us "cent" for one-hundredth of a dollar. A C note is a $100 bill.

Have you heard that "it's all about the Benjamins?" This slang term is also a substitute for $100 and alludes to the appearance of founding father Benjamin Franklin on the one-hundred-dollar bill. I haven't really heard anyone refer to a "Hamilton" for $10 or a "Jackson" to mean a $20 bill.

A very common slang term for dollars is bucks which we believe originated from early American colonists who would often trade deerskins, or buckskin, as a form of money.

Cha-ching (or Ka-ching) to mean money is a word that imitates the sound, as with an onomatopoeia, of an old-fashioned cash register completing a sale. I have heard it used to mean money but more often used as an interjection when money is made. "I made a bet and -  cha-ching - I got 75 bucks!"

And there are a long list of ones that still have no clear origin story. For example, moola (or moolah) is an old term for money, but nobody seems to really know where it originated. Merriam-Webster says the word was first used to mean money in 1936.

Here are others: "cabbage", "clam", "milk", "dosh", "dough", "shillings", "frogskins", "notes", "ducats", "loot", "bones", "bar", "coin", "folding stuff", "honk", "lolly", "lucre"/"filthy "Lucre", "moola/moolah", "mazuma", "paper", "scratch", "readies", "rhino."

Of course, slang varies by geography and money slang in India. Though I might only hear the term dosh used in the UK, I could probably hear dough or bread used to mean money in London or New York. 

synergy

SYNERGY is the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.

It appears in English in the mid-19th century with origins from Greek sunergos  "working together" from sun- ‘together’ + ergon ‘work’.

In Christian theology, synergism is the idea that salvation involves some form of cooperation between divine grace and human freedom.

The words synergy and synergetic have been used in the field of physiology to mean the correlation or concourse of action between different organs in health; and, according to some, in disease.

The word appeared in 1896 from Henri Mazel in social psychology in his La synergie sociale, in which he argued that Darwinian theory failed to account for "social synergy" or "social love", a collective evolutionary drive. The highest civilizations were the work not only of the elite but of the masses too; those masses must be led, however, because the crowd, a feminine and unconscious force, cannot distinguish between good and evil.

In technology and media, it is applied to the compression of transmission, access and use of information. Synergy can also be defined as the combination of human strengths and computer strengths, such as advanced chess. Computers can process data much more quickly than humans, but lack the ability to respond meaningfully to arbitrary stimuli.

In media economics, synergy is the promotion and sale of a product (and all its versions) throughout the various subsidiaries of a media conglomerate. For example, when a movie also has a soundtrack, toys, and video games. Walt Disney is given credit for pioneering "synergistic marketing" techniques in the 1930s by granting dozens of firms the right to use his Mickey Mouse character in products and ads, and continued to market Disney media through licensing arrangements. 

REO Speedwagon

REO SPEEDWAGON in 2010 CC BY 3.0, Link

REO SPEEDWAGON REO (originally R.E.O. Speedwagon) is an American rock band that formed in Champaign, Illinois in 1967. 

Their record sales peaked and they had their biggest hits during the 1970s. The group's best-selling album is Hi Infidelity (1980), which contained four US Top 40 hits and sold more than 10 million copies. 

Over the course of their career, the band has sold more than 40 million records and has charted 13 Top 40 hits, including the number ones "Keep On Loving You" and "Can't Fight This Feeling." 

Though REO Speedwagon's record sales certainly waned in the late 1980s, the band actually remains a popular live act. The band appeared in an episode in the third season of the American TV series Ozark in 2020 and after the appearance, four of REO's songs reentered the Billboard rock charts.

A REO Speed Wagon Fire Truck at Jack Daniel's Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee
by Timj at Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Their name is not the initials of the band's founders. The REO Speed Wagon (alternatively Reo Speedwagon) was a light motor truck manufactured by REO Motor Car Company. It is an ancestor of the pickup truck. First introduced in 1915, production continued through at least 1953. "R.E.O." was the initials of Ransom Elliot Olds, the founder of the company and the name that later was applied to the Oldsmobile Car Company who produced an REO Speedwagon firetruck.

Badge from an REO Speed Wagon Fire Truck by Timjarrett, Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

Grand Funk Railroad

GRAND FUNK RAILROAD (AKA Grand Funk and GFR) is an American hard rock band popular during the 1970s. They were constantly touring and played many large arenas worldwide. They were very popular but didn't receive equivalent critical acclaim.

The band's name is a play on the Grand Trunk Western Railroad, which is a railroad line that runs through Flint, Michigan, the hometown of the band members.

Grand Funk Railroad was formed as a trio in 1969 by Mark Farner (guitar, keyboards, harmonica, vocals) and Don Brewer (drums, vocals), and Mel Schacher (bass). Brewer had been in the band Terry Knight and the Pack, and Knight became the band's manager and suggested the band's name.

They disbanded in the 1980s but were reformed with replacement members and had "The American Band Tour 2019 - Celebrating 50 Years of Funk" starting in January 2019.

       

walled gardens

There are literal walled gardens in the world. These gardens are surrounded by walls to keep out animals, unwanted human visitors and in some places, the walls shelter the garden from wind and frost. They can also be decorative and there may be smaller walls within the walled perimeter. 

A later development was the walled or gated community. One of the primary purposes of a gated community is to offer its residents safety. Some were built near areas that were considered unsafe. Besides having walls, a gated community increases safety by having membership, guards and by eliminating through traffic.

These days if you hear the term there is a good chance that it is a figurative walled garden that is a closed platform or closed technology ecosystem. Since we borrowed the term "ecosystem" from nature and have since created manmade ecosystems (or damaged others), it makes sense that we turn botanical garden ecosystems into technology ecosystems.

A good example of such an ecosystem is Apple’s hardware, software and services which work harmoniously together and do not work with other hardware, software and services. Apple users tend to remain, not always by choice, in their walled garden. This has also led to antitrust scrutiny (note the Epic vs. Apple case. Google, Facebook and others would like to keep you in their walled gardens.

Coleslaw

My wife made coleslaw this past weekend for a barbecue and I asked some guests why it is called coleslaw. No one knew. One person said it's cold slaw and it means cold salad. Wrong and right.

coleslaw Wikimedia CC BY 3.0, Link

Coleslaw is the correct spelling for the cabbage-based side salad often served alongside barbecue. It is sometimes mistaken as "cold slaw" as it is usually served cold. The word derives from the Dutch koolsla, with cole referring to cole crops such as cabbage.

purple cabbage slaw, Wikimedia CC BY 3.0, Link

Coleslaw's origin can be traced back as far as the ancient Romans, who served a dish of cabbage, vinegar, eggs and spices. The version Americans generally eat today comes from the Dutch who founded New York state. They grew cabbage around the Hudson River that they used in a shredded cabbage salad they called koosla. Kooll means cabbage and sla is salad

tsundoku, sudoku and otaku

A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word adopted from one language (the donor language) and incorporated into another language without translation.

You can probably guess from the title of this article that I'm writing about three Japanese loanwords today. There are a good number of Japanese loanwords in English: karaoke, karate, tsunami, typhoon, teriyaki, sake, sushi, manga, anime, tofu, emoji, origami, shiatsu, ramen, and wasabi make up just a partial list.

Tsundoku is a new loanword for me. It's one of those words that has a larger meaning - almost a lifestyle. It is used to mean acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in your home without reading them. Related words are tsunde-oku meaning to pile things up ready for later and then leave them, and dokusho which means reading books. Tsundoku also seems to refer to those books ready for reading later when they are on a bookshelf or nightstand. As currently written, the word combines the characters for "pile up" (積) and the character for "read" (読) - a "reading pile."

The word dates back to the Meiji era (1868-1912) and appeared when someone, perhaps jokingly, took out that oku from tsunde oku and substituted doku (to read). Tsunde doku would be difficult to pronounce, so it was compressed into tsundoku.

I initially confused tsundoku with Sudoku, that logic-based number-placement puzzle that my wife plays every morning as a kind of meditation. No connection between the two words other than some letters. These puzzles are quite old, but for Westerners, they became familiar in the 19th century, and then in the late 1970s when they first appeared for Americans in puzzle books. At that time they were known as Number Place puzzles. In 1986, the Japanese puzzle company Nikoli published them under the name Sudoku, meaning "single number."

Otaku literally means “house" but in English and Japanese, the word is used to describe someone who spends a lot of their free time at home. In the original Japanese usage that meant home playing video games, reading manga and watching anime. In either language, this person has little or no interest in more social or outdoor activities. It isn't always considered a bad word to have attached to you since fans of anime and manga use it to describe others with similar interests.