Unicorn (finance)

One of the Unicorn Tapestries, c. 1495–1505
 (The Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) Public Domain, Link

When most people think of a UNICORN, they imagine the legendary creature that has been described since antiquity as a beast with a single large, pointed, spiraling horn projecting from its forehead. 

But "unicorn" also refers to many other more modern usages. One of the nhe newest comes from the world of finance.

A unicorn is a term in the business world to indicate a privately held startup company valued at over $1 billion.

The term was coined in 2013 by venture capitalist Aileen Lee. He chose the name because he was equating the mythical creature with a statistical rarity of such a successful ventures.

Since then, "decacorn" has come to mean those companies over $10 billion in value and "hectocorn" is used to describe a company valued over $100 billion. 

When Lee originally coined the term, there were only 39 companies that were considered unicorns, but the rarity of unicorns has decreased as the number of them increases.

In 2018 alone, 16 U.S. companies became unicorns, resulting in 119 private companies worldwide valued at $1 billion or more. As of this writing, six out of the top ten most valuable unicorns are based in China.

Top ten largest unicorns overall.

1.     Ant Financial – China
2.     ByteDance – China
3.     DiDi – China
4.     SpaceX – USA
5.     Stripe – USA
6.     Lufax – China
7.     JUUL Labs – USA
8.     Cainiao – China
9.     Palantir Technologies – USA
10.     Kuaishou – China

Top U.S. unicorn SpaceX headquarters in December 2017
with plumes from a flight of a Falcon 9 rocket visible overhead CC0, Link

Beastie Boys

Beastie Boys, Club Citta Kawasaki, Japan, Check Your Head  tour, 1992 - via Wikimedia

The BEASTIE BOYS are another band that has played games with their name origin. Some bands (like Imagine Dragons) say their name is an anagram. Others have said their name is actually an abbreviation or acronym with each letter standing for some word.

Such is the case with BEASTIE BOYS who, according to Michael Diamond, is an acronym with BEASTIE stands for Boys Entering Anarchistic Stages Towards Internal Excellence. Of course, that means the "boys" part is repeated.

Beastie Boys were an American rap rock group from New York City, formed in 1978. The original lineup was Michael "Mike D" Diamond (vocals, drums), Adam "MCA" Yauch (vocals, bass), and Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz (vocals, guitar, programming). The band formed with members of a hardcore punk band called the Young Aborigines in 1978. When that band's bass player left and Yauch joined in, the band changed their name to Beastie Boys.

On a 2007 Charlie Rose TV show interview, both Yauch and Diamond acknowledged that the acronym, in fact, was an "afterthought", conceived after the band name was already chosen.

Yauch died from cancer at the age of 47 in 2012. In 2014, Mike D confirmed that he and Ad-Rock would not make music under the Beastie Boys name again. Founding Beastie Boys guitarist John Berry died in 2016, aged 52, as a result of frontotemporal dementia. He is usually credited with naming the band Beastie Boys just because it sounded cool. He played guitar on the first EP and the first Beastie Boys "show" took place at Berry's loft.

   

Is It Autumn or Fall?

Autumn by Dietmar Rabich (Derivative work: Sting), CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

It has felt like winter here in New Jersey for weeks although the winter solstice made it official today (December 21). As trees have lost their color and their leaves and then were hit with killing frosts and ice. As we enter winter, I asked myself today why the autumn season is sometimes called "fall." Is it just because leaves fall from trees?

The word autumn is derived from Latin autumnus, with connotations of the passing of the year. After the Greek era, the word continued to be used as the Old French word autompne (automne in modern French) or autumpne in Middle English,[18] and was later normalised to the original Latin. 

There are rare examples of its use as early as the 12th century, but by the 16th century, it was in common use. Before the 16th century, "harvest" was the term usually used to refer to the season, as it is common in other West Germanic languages to this day (cf. Dutch herfst, German Herbst and Scots hairst). 

A change occurred as the majority of people moved from working the land to living in towns. The harvest itself was removed from their daily life and came to refer more to the time of year rather than the activity of reaping crops.

The alternative word for the season,"fall," also has roots in old Germanic languages. The exact derivation is unclear. Possibilities include the Old English fiæll or feallan and the Old Norse fall. They seem like good origins but these words mean "to fall from a height" and not seasons or times of the year. 

The most likely explanation is that the term derived in 16th-century England as a contraction of Middle English expressions like "fall of the leaf" and "fall of the year".

With the peak of 17th century English emigration to the British colonies in North America, "fall" as a season was popularized though it was gradually becoming nearly obsolete in Britain.