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Here's Part Two of Interesting Etymologies (word origins)!
January
January has its beginnings in Roman mythology, named for
Janus (Ianuarius), the god of the doorway. The Latin
word for door is ianua. January is the door to the year.
January in Czech called leden, meaning "ice month". In
Finnish, the month is called tammikuu, meaning "month of
the oak".
Quarantine
Comes from quarantena, the 17th-century Venetian-Italian
word for forty day period. When a ship was thought to be infected
with disease the crew were not permitted to make contact with the
shore for 40 days. Today, to quarantine also means to isolate,
usually to contain the spread of something considered dangerous
(but not always disease).
Bikini
The bikini comes from the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall
Islands. It made its debut in 1946. is Marshallese, a
Malayo-Polynesian language of the Marshall Islands. An engineer
named Louis Reard named his two-piece women's bathing suit after
the Bikini Atoll, where four days earlier the United States had
begun a series of atomic and hydrogen bomb tests, with the hopes
that his bikini would "explode" upon the world. That series of
tests became was the first peacetime explosion of a nuclear
weapon. There were twenty-three American nuclear tests that would
extend more than a decade, including a fifteen-megaton H-bomb
explosion on March 1, 1954.
Paparazzi
Paparazzi are photographers who take candid photographs of
celebrities. The word paparazzi was actually introduced by the
1960 film La dolce vita directed by Federico Fellini.
One of the characters in the film is a news photographer named
Paparazzo. Its onomatopoeic resemblance to the Sicilian word for
an oversized mosquito, papataceo, made Fellini state
this: "Paparazzo suggests to me a buzzing insect, hovering,
darting, stinging."
Bootleg
Bootlegging usually refers to making, transporting and/or selling
illegal alcohol or copyrighted material. The term originates from
America, referring to the long leather boots
worn by cowboys in the Old West. They were used to store illicit
goods, including an extra gun, a bowie knife, or a flask of
moonshine. The phrase surged in popularity during the Prohibition
Era. There are also many phrases which use the term, including
"bootleg recording", "bootleg play" (in American football),
"bootleg mining", and "bootleg turn" (a driving maneuver).
Hazard
This word originates from the Arabic word al
zahr, which means "the dice". In Western Europe hazard was
associated games using dice, learned during the Crusades while in
the Holy Land. The term eventually took on the definition of
exposure to danger because games using dice were associated with
the risks of gambling and con artists using corrupted dice.
Malaria
Malaria is an infectious disease caused by a misquito bite. The
word comes from the medieval Italian words
mal ("bad") and aria ("air"). This "bad air"
described the swamps around Rome. This 'bad air' was believed to
be the cause of the fever that often developed in those who spent
time around the swamps. This belief is partially true: the
illness known today as malaria, is due to certain protozoans
present in the mosquitos that bred around these swamps, which
then caused recurring feverish symptoms.
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