Amazon

The Amazon.com home page in 1999

Amazon.com, also known simply as Amazon, was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos.

Bezos incorporated the company as "Cadabra" in 1994 as a play on the "magical" incantation "abracadabra." A year later, he changed the name because he was told it was heard as "cadaver" and a dead body is not a good association for a company.

Bezos also bought the domain relentless.com for possible use, but was told by friends it soiunded too sinister. and briefly considered naming his online store Relentless, but friends told him the name sounded a bit sinister.

The company went online as Amazon.com in 1995.

Bezos selected the name Amazon in a dictionary search wanting an "A" name that would be high on an alphabetized list (an old print phone book idea) and because the Amazon river was by far the "biggest" river in the world, and it matched his goal to be the biggest store in the world. The current logo features a curved "smile arrow" leading from A to Z, representing that the company carries every product from A to Z.

The Amazon River (originally called Río Santa María del Mar Dulce, or Mar Dulce, "sweet sea" because of its fresh water pushing out into the ocean) took on its current name from another Spanish explorer, Francisco de Orellana. He was the first European man to travel from the river's sources in the Andes to the end of the river. He used the name Amazonas because the natives that attacked his expedition were mostly women and he was reminded of the woman warriors, the Amazons, from Hellenic culture. The Amazons were real Scythian women who fought and later were mythologized by the Greeks.

Abracadabra

Abracadabra is an incantation used, primarily in stage magic tricks for entertainment purposes.
But in its origin story was an ancient belief that the incantation had healing powers.

The word's origin is not clear, but it is often listed as Aramaic from a phrase meaning "I create as I speak." The etymology is not confirmed. Wikipedia says that the phrase in Aramaic אברא כדברא would be more accurately translated as "I create like the word."

The origin stories are numerous: an abbreviated forms of the Hebrew words for "father, son, holy spirit,"; a reference to Abraxas, a god worshiped in Alexandria in pre-Christian times.

The first known mention of the word was in the third century AD in a book called Liber Medicinalis  by Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, physician to the Roman emperor Caracalla. It was he who prescribed wearing an amulet containing the word written in the form of a triangle for several lethal diseases.

It was used by the Gnostics of the sect of Basilides, and is found on Abraxas stones, which were worn as amulets.

The Puritans dismissed the word as having any power, but some Londoners posted the word on their doorways to ward off sickness during the Great Plague of London.

English occultist Aleister Crowley believed it had power and used the spelling abrahadabra.

Today, it is best known as it is used by stage magicians when performing a trick. It is also common in the popular culture in comic books, games, music, film and television and literature.

J.K. Rowling said in a talk in 2004 that the incantation Avada Kedavra in her Harry Potter books (known as the "killing curse") "is the original of abracadabra, which means 'let the thing be destroyed.' Originally, it was used to cure illness and the 'thing' was the illness, but I decided to make it the 'thing' as in the person standing in front of me. I take a lot of liberties with things like that. I twist them round and make them mine."

Bits and Bytes

Bits and bytes are computer terms that have come into fairly common usage.

The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer. For this reason, it is the smallest addressable unit of memory in many computer architectures.

The bit is a basic unit of information. It can have only one of two values, and is most commonly represented as either a 0 or 1.

The term bit is a portmanteau of binary digit.

The story of the bit began in 1948, when Bell Labs in New Jersey invented the transistor. A young engineer named Claude Shannon published  “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” and he included "bit" as a new fundamental "unit for measuring information.”

At that time, it must have seemed strange to consider "information" to be measurable and quantifiable.

Shannon was entering a field that didn't exist and that he would christen “information theory.”

The term byte was coined by Werner Buchholz in July 1956, during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer. The term is a deliberate alternate spelling of bite to avoid accidental confusion or mutation to bit.

Early computers used a variety of four-bit and six-bit binary coded decimal representations for printable graphic patterns. During the early 1960s, while also active in ASCII standardization, IBM simultaneously introduced in its product line of System/360 the eight-bit Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code. This was an expansion of their six-bit code used in earlier card punches. The System/360 became prominent and led to ubiquitous adoption of the eight-bit storage size.

Kansas City Royals

One might suspect that the team name  of the Kansas City Royals comes from the older teams in Montreal that were named after nearby Mount Royal.

The Kansas City Royals baseball team was founded in 1969 and based in Kansas City, Missouri.

The name "Royals" is said to originate from the American Royal, a livestock show, horse show, rodeo, and championship barbecue competition held annually in Kansas City since 1899.

There is a kind of royal connection in other teams for the city: the NFL football Chiefs, the former Kansas City Kings of the NBA, the formerly named Kansas City Wizards of MLS, and the former Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro National League.

The Royals compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member team of the American League (AL) Central division. The Royals have participated in four World Series, winning in 1985 and 2015, and losing in 1980 and 2014.

They entered the American League as an expansion franchise in 1969 along with the Seattle Pilots. The city had lost the Athletics (Kansas City's previous major league team that played from 1955 to 1967) when they moved to Oakland, California in 1968.

http://kansascity.royals.mlb.com

Naming Cities and Towns

If you look up the origin of "city," you find that it comes from the early 13th century. In medieval usage, it was a cathedral town, but originally it referred to "any settlement," regardless of size.

The distinction of town and city seems to occur in the 14th century. In English, a city ranked above a town which ranked above a smaller borough.

The word city goes back to Latin civitatem originally meaning "citizenship, the condition or rights of a citizen. But the Latin word for "city" was urbs, which is where we get the adjective "urban."

There are too many names of cities and towns to name and explain, but here are some common naming conventions used in English, particularly in America.

The obvious conventio is to name a new town after an older one. In the U.S., we have Rome, NY; Moscow, IN; Berlin and Vienna, VA. This was sometimes a homage to where the early settlers had come from, but also a way to add distinction to a new place.

Settlers to new places who wanted to harken back to their old world often added "New" in front of their beloved city. New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, etc.

Adding a suffix such as town, ton, burgh, city, ville, land, or polis on the end of a noun (name or otherwise) gives us Smithville, Beaverton, Irvington, Indianapolis, Roseland etc.

Other suffixes that are not only used for place names are also used. Ford, fort, field, plains, view, burgh, side, grove, wood, and way give us Frankfort, Springfield, Pompton Plains, Plainview, Cedar Grove, Maplewood etc.

We also name places often for a founder or famous person: (Lord) Fairfax, (John Foster) Dulles, San Francisco (Saint Francis) etc.

There are also conventions in other languages. For example, the suffix -au, -aue (related to rivers or water), is used in German for settlements at rivers and creeks, such as Passau.

The suffix -burg (meaning borough) is seen in Hamburg, Luxembourg, Regensburg, Salzburg (also with the Ancient Roman reference to salt).

The suffix -berg ("mountain") is attached to Heidelberg, Nürnberg (Nuremberg), Königsberg ("king's mountain", now Kaliningrad).

The -furt means a "ford", such as with Erfurt and Frankfurt.

You must be careful in your naming though. Syracuse, New York was named for the classical city in Sicily that was founded as a Corinthian colony in the 8th century B.C.E.. But it is likely that it comes from a pre-Hellenic word, perhaps the Phoenician serah  meaning “to feel ill,” in reference to its location near a swamp.

The city of Bayonne, New Jersey comes from bayonet, a type of dagger (usually fitted to a firearm) from the French baionnette. Bayonne, a city in Gascony, is supposedly where they first were made.