by Jan Hacin

1. This word comes from the Arabic al-kuhl, which originally meant a very fine
powder of antimony used as eye makeup. It conveyed the idea of something very
fine and subtle, and the Arab alchemists therefore gave the name of al-kuhl to any
impalpable powder obtained by sublimation (the direct transformation of a solid
into vapor, or the reverse process), and thus to all compounds obtained through
the distillation process.

2. From the Greek "barbaroi," meaning "babblers," used to mean non-Greeks, i.e.,
people who didn't speak Greek; from the sound that the Greeks thought they were
making: "bar bar bar bar..."

3. Berserk most likely comes from the Old Icelandic "berserkr," meaning "bear shirt."
This refers to Scandinavian warriors who wore, quite literally, bear shirts which
they thought would render them invincible. I believe the Icelandic term evolves
from Scandinavian, "bjorn sherkr," but I am not sure.

4. Many banks in post-Renaissance Europe issued small, porcelain "borrower's tiles" to their
creditworthy customers. Like credit cards, these tiles were imprinted with the owner's name, his
credit limit, and the name of the bank. Each time the customer wanted to borrow money, he had to
present the tile to the bank teller, who would compare the imprinted credit limit with how much
the customer had already borrowed. If the borrower was past the limit, the teller "broke" the tile on
the spot.

5. From the Latin Candidus word meaning, "bright, shining, glistening white." The
ancient Roman candidates for office would wear bright white togas. This same
word also gave rise to "candid," which candidates rarely are.

6. Comes from the Spanish word of the same name, which itself came from the Nahuatl (the language
of the Aztecs) word "tchocoatl." The first Spaniard to encounter substance was Hernan Cortes,
shortly after his initial reception (and the only friendly one, I might add) at the Court of Moctezuma in
the island-city of Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico City) in 1519. After highly praising the chocolate-
based drink and inquiring how it was made, he was told that one started with "cacahuaquchtl"
powder (the origin of the word "cocoa"), which was then boiled in water and combined with chilli,
musk and honey.

7. We borrowed it from latin, meaning liquid. The ancient philosophers believed that four liquids
entered into the makeup of our bodies, and that our temperament (temperamentum,"mixture") was
determined by the proportions of these four fluids,or humors, which they listed as blood, phlegm,
yellow bile, and black bile. If you had an overplus of blood, the first humor, you were of the
optimistic, hopeful, confident temperament. A generous portion of phlegm, on the other hand made
you "phlegmatic", or slow and unexciteable. Too much yellow bile and you saw the world through a
"bilious" eye , and since the word "bile" is chole in Latin, you were apt to be choleric and short
tempered. The fourth humor, the non-existent black bile, was a little special invention of the ancient
physiologists. A too heavy proportion of this made you melancholic. Any imbalance of these humors,
therefore made a person unwell and perhaps eccentric, and, as the years went by, the word humor
took on the meaning of "oddness". And finally the word was applied to those who could provoke
laughter at the oddities and paradoxes of life.

8. The Chinese invented ke-tsiap--a concoction of pickled fish and spices (but no tomatoes)--in the
1690s. By the early 1700s its popularity had spread to Malaysia, where British explorers first
encountered it. By 1740 the sauce--renamed ketchup--was an English staple, and it was becoming
popular in the American colonies. Tomato ketchup wasn't invented until the 1790s, when New
England colonists first mixed tomatoes into the sauce. It took so long to add tomatoes to the sauce
because, for most of the 18th. Century, people had assumed that they were poisonous, as the
tomato is a close relative of the toxic belladonna and nightshade plants.

9. From the Latin "nescius," for "ignorant," and, at various times before the current
definition became established meant "foolish" then "foolishly precise" then
"pedantically precise" then "precise in a good way" and then our current definition.

10. Robot comes from the Czech word "robot," which means "worker." In 1923, Karl
Capek, a well-known, Czech, science-fiction writer at the time, wrote a futuristic
thriller about a nightmarish scenario in which the machines have taken over (a la,
the "Terminator") and implanted circuitry in humans to make them into mindless
zombies willing to serve them as workers or "robots."

11. In the early days of Rome its soldiers were given a handful of salt each day. The salt ration was
subsequently replaced by a sum of money allowing each man to buy his own, and relieving the
commisariat of the trouble of transporting it. The money received was referred to as their "salt
money" (salarium in Latin). Eventually, the term would make its way into medieval France, where a
soldier's payment was known as his solde (which is still in use today as the term for a soldier's or
sailor's pay), and it was in paid for with a special coin called a sol. By extension, the word also came
to refer not only to a soldier's wage, but also to the soldier himself, evidenced by the medieval
French term soldat, which itself came from the Old French soudier. For its part, the English word
"soldier" comes from the Middle English souder, which also derived from soudier

12. After large parts of Slavonia (the current Yugoslavian Federation province of
Serbia, as well as portions of surrounding countries) were subjugated by the Holy
Roman Empire in the Middle Ages, a Slav became synonymous with someone
who lived in servitude. Eventually Slav became slave.