Arctic

The Arctic is a polar region located at the northernmost part of Earth, and it consists of the Arctic Ocean, adjacent seas, and parts of Alaska (United States), Northern Canada (Canada), Finland, Greenland (Denmark), Iceland, Norway, Russia and Sweden.

But interestingly, its name comes from the sky above that predominantly treeless permafrost-containing tundra. The Great Bear Constellation, officially Ursa Major, comes from Latin where it means “greater she-bear.” Go back earlier to the Greek arktos which is the word for bear.

The name Arctic, meaning bearish, describes not only a land of the polar bear but also the parts of the Earth where the Great Bear constellation dominates the heavens even more than in the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.

A very large constellation, Ursa Major is best known for its famous asterism (star grouping) the Big Dipper.

Hygge and Hugs

Hygge (pronounced hue-guh) is a Danish word used to mean something is cozy, comfortable, and charming. This coziness philosophy became the topic of a bunch of lifestyle books and blogs the past few years.

Hygge values the idea of cherishing yourself, candlelight, bakeries, a warming fireplace, dinner with friends, values experiences over possessions, and treasuring a sense of community.

The word hygge comes from a Norwegian word meaning "wellbeing, it is also said that it might originate from the word hug. Hug comes from the 1560s word hugge, which means "to embrace". The word hugge is of unknown origin but is highly associated with an Old Norse term, hygga, which means "to comfort", which in turn comes from the word hugr, meaning "mood." Go back further in etymology and we arrive at the Germanic word hugyan, which relates to the Old English hycgan, meaning "to think, consider."  I think that's a lot of hugging.

Hygge is not a new term. It first appeared in Danish writing in the 19th Century. While hygge has exactly the same meaning in Norwegian as in Danish and is a widely used word in Norway "hygge" as a cultural philosophy is mostly a recent Danish phenomenon. In Norway "hygge" is just a word, similar in status to "cozy" in English-speaking countries.

But the hygge lifestyle has moved beyond Denmark and it is taking hold in the United States.

Google

Larry Page and Sergei Brin originally nicknamed their new search engine "BackRub", because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site. But they changed the name to Google.

Supposedly, the name of the search engine originated from a misspelling of the word "googol" which is the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Googol was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide very large quantities of information.

The original Google search engine was on the Stanford University website servers with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu. The official domain name for google.com was registered on September 15, 1997 and the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998 when it was still based in a garage.

Some brands become generic nouns as the vernacular word for a category. Such is the case with brands such as Band-Aid (for any adhesive bandage) and Kleenex (for paper tissues) and in the past "fridge" for any refrigerator had originated with the Frigidaire brand. This is both an honor and a brand confusion issue.

People began to use "google" to mean a search engine and eventually as a verb, as in "I'll google that." Larry Page used it as a verb form before he even launched the company. Though not as commonly used to mean "to search" now, at one time "to google" might have meant to use Yahoo or Bing or AltaVista or any one of the other competing search engines.