10 Words With Spooky Etymologies

filed under: Words
Image credit: 
istock

Ghosts, ghouls and monsters turn up everywhere at Halloween—including in our language. From treacherous underground goblins to ghostly roaming primates, here are the spooky origins of ten familiar words.

1. AGHAST

Although it’s used much more loosely in English today, the word aghast literally means “frightened by a ghost.” That’s because the “ghast” of aghast is a derivative of the Old English word gæsten, meaning “to terrify,” which is in turn a derivative of gæst, the Old English word for “ghost.” The “gast” of flabbergast, incidentally, probably comes from the same root.

2. BUGABOO

Bugaboo has been used since the early 1700s to refer to an imagined problem or bugbear (although oddly, in 19th century English, it was also used as a nickname for a bailiff). The word itself has two possible origins, both of which are equally ghoulish: It might come from an old Celtic word (most likely bucca-boo, an old Cornish word for a devil or spectre), or it might come from “Bugibu,” the name of a monstrous demon that appeared in a Medieval French poem, Aliscans, written in the mid-1100s.

3. COBALT

The chemical element cobalt takes its name from the “kobold,” a type of devious subterranean hobgoblin in German folklore. Described in Sir Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830) as “a species of gnomes who haunted the dark and solitary places,” the kobolds were once believed to inhabit the rocks and tunnels of mineshafts, where they would reward those miners who respected them with rich discoveries, and would punish any others with rockfalls, poisonous fumes and underground fires. The kobold’s connection to cobalt stems from the fact that two of the element’s most important ores—namely cobaltite and smaltite—both contain an equivalent amount of arsenic, which makes mining for them a particularly hazardous business. Long before the harmful nature of these metals was known to science, however, any miners who fell ill collecting cobalt would be left with little option but to blame their misfortune on the treacherous kobolds.

4. LARVA

In Latin, larva originally meant “ghost” or “ghoul,” and when the word first began to be used in English in the mid-1600s, it meant precisely that. But because the ghosts and ghouls of antiquity were often portrayed as wearing a disguise to hide amongst the world of the living, in Latin larva also came to mean “mask,” and it was this figurative sense that the 18th century naturalist Carl Linnaeus meant when he began to call the juvenile forms of insects larvae in the 1740s.

5. LEMUR

Carl Linnaeus was also responsible for the word lemur, which he stole from the ghoulish Lemures of Ancient Rome. To the Romans, the Lemures were the skeletal, zombie-like ghosts of murder victims, executed criminals, sailors lost at sea, and anyone else who had died leaving unfinished business behind them on Earth. According to Roman tradition, ultimately the Lemures would return to haunt the world of the living each night—and hence when Linnaeus discovered a group of remarkably human-like primates wandering silently around the tropical rainforests in the dead of night, he had the perfect name for them.

6. MASCOT

We might use it more generally to mean an emblem or symbol, but a mascot was originally a talisman or charm, namely something intended to be used to protect someone from harm. In this sense the word is derived from masca, an old Provençal French word for a witch or sorceress.

7. MINDBOGGLING

The “boggle” of mindboggling is derived from an old Middle English word, bugge, for an invisible ghost or monster. These bugges (or “bogles” as they became known) could not be seen by human eyes, but could supposedly be seen by animals: a spooked horse that reared up for no apparent reason would once have been said to have seen a bogle.

8. NICKEL

Like cobalt, nickel takes its name from another ghoul from German folklore, known as the Kupfernickel, or “copper-demon.” Unlike the kobolds, however, nickels were more mischievous than dangerous and would simply trick unsuspecting miners into thinking they had discovered copper, when in fact they had discovered nickel, which was comparatively less valuable. Like the kobolds, however, the nickels had to be placated and respected, else they could cause cave-ins or other underground disasters.  

9. TERABYTE

The “tera” of words like terabyte, terawatt and terahertz is derived from the Greek word for “monster,” teras. The words teratism, meaning “a monstrosity,” and teratology, “the study of biological abnormalities,” are derived from the same root.

10. ZEITGEIST

If a poltergeist is literally a “noisy ghost” in German, then a zeitgeist is simply a “spirit of the age”—that is to say, something that seems to sum up the era in which it exists.


October 11, 2016 – 4:35pm

13 Creepy, Kooky Facts About ‘The Addams Family’

Image credit: 
Paramount

Starting in 1938, Gomez, Morticia, Uncle Fester, Lurch, Grandmama, Wednesday, Pugsley, and Thing appeared in The New Yorker in a series of cartoons by Charles Addams. After two seasons in the mid-’60s as a sitcom, then two more as a Saturday morning cartoon in the ’70s, the adventures of the strange, morbid Addams family seemed destined to solely exist in illustration form. Then, after Charles Addams’ passing in 1988, even the cartoons stopped—but in 1991, The Addams Family movie brought the pale gang to the cinema. Here are a few things you might not have known about the film.

1. THE IDEA TO BRING BACK THE ADDAMS FAMILY CAME FROM A CAR RIDE.

Scott Rudin, head of production at 20th Century Fox, was riding in a van with other company executives one day after a movie screening. “Everyone was there—(studio chiefs) Barry Diller and Leonard Goldberg and (marketing chief) Tom Sherak—when Tom’s kid started singing ‘The Addams Family’ theme,” Rudin told the LA Times. “And suddenly everyone in the van was singing the theme, letter perfect, note for note.” The next day, Rudin proposed to Diller and Goldberg that they make an Addams Family movie—and they went for it.

2. MC HAMMER WROTE AN AWARD-WINNING SONG FOR THE MOVIE.

The “Addams Groove” music video played before the film during its first few weeks in theaters. The final track on Too Legit to Quit would end up being MC Hammer’s last visit to the top 10 of the Billboard singles charts in the U.S. It also won the 1991 Golden Raspberry for Worst Original Song, beating out fellow nominees “Why Was I Born (Freddy’s Dead)” by Iggy Pop, and Vanilla Ice’s “Cool as Ice.”

3. ANTHONY HOPKINS TURNED DOWN THE ROLE OF FESTER.

Hopkins instead opted to play Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs (he got the role after Sean Connery was initially approached). Hopkins would win the Best Actor Oscar for his performance.

4. TIM BURTON WAS INITIALLY SET TO DIRECT.

Burton had worked with Addams Family screenwriters Caroline Thompson and Larry Wilson on previous projects, but ended up not taking the job. Almost 20 years later, Burton was rumored to be developing a 3D stop-motion animated Addams Family movie, but it was announced last year that he was off the project.

5. IT WAS BARRY SONNENFELD’S DIRECTORIAL DEBUT.

The Addams Family was Barry Sonnenfeld’s directorial debut, but he had experience as a cinematographer on films like Blood Simple, Big, Raising Arizona, Misery, When Harry Met Sally…, and Miller’s Crossing. After his agent told him that he would lick a carpet if he couldn’t find him a directing job within one year, he found Sonnenfeld a seemingly plum first time assignment helming a high profile movie (in less than a year). As a joke, Scott Rudin let it be known to Sonnenfeld that he wasn’t his first choice by putting a different director’s name on the back of the director’s chair every morning on set. Some of the names that replaced Sonnenfeld’s were Joe Dante, Terry Gilliam, David Lynch, and Rudin’s first choice, Tim Burton.

6. SONNENFELD FAINTED DURING SHOOTING.

Three weeks into directing, Sonnenfeld was talking to a studio executive who was concerned about the budget for the film when he felt a “tremendous pressure” in his chest, “as if someone was blowing up a balloon inside me,” then passed out. He also dealt with sciatica during filming, and had to shut down the Los Angeles production for several days when his wife needed major surgery in New York.

7. THERE WAS A “BLACK CLOUD” HANGING OVER THE MOVIE.

Owen Roizman, the film’s cinematographer, quit to work on another movie shortly after Sonnenfeld’s fainting incident. His replacement, Gayl Tattersoll, stopped production for a couple of days when he needed to be hospitalized for a sinus infection, and never returned. Sonnenfeld ended up doing the job himself. In front of the camera, a blood vessel burst in the eye of Raul Julia, the actor who played Gomez. These incidents led the future Get Shorty and Men In Black director to say that he felt like there was a “pervasive black cloud” hanging over the movie.

8. THERE WAS AN ACTOR REBELLION, LED BY 10-YEAR-OLD CHRISTINA RICCI.

The actors were concerned about the ambiguity of the big Fester storyline in the script. Initially, it was going to be unknown if Gordon, the man suffering from memory loss that looked just like Uncle Fester, was actually Fester. The actors nominated Wednesday Addams herself, Christina Ricci, to give an impassioned plea to Rudin and Sonnenfeld two weeks before shooting that Fester should not be an imposter. Sonnenfeld remembered that the only actor to not care was Christopher Lloyd, the man playing Fester.

9. ANJELICA HUSTON WATCHED “GREY GARDENS” TO PLAY MORTICIA.

Cher was interested in playing Morticia, but Huston was producer Rudin’s first choice. Huston, who grew up in Ireland, was more familiar with the Charles Addams drawings than the old TV show, and decided it would be pointless to try and replicate actress Carolyn Jones’ “ideal” portrayal of Morticia anyway. The future Academy Award winner turned to the 1975 documentary Grey Gardens—a movie about the aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy who lived in a deteriorating mansion filled with garbage and animal waste—for inspiration instead.

10. HUSTON HAD TO GO THROUGH A LOT TO GET INTO CHARACTER.

”Morticia has a shape only a cartoonist can draw,” Sonnenfeld told Entertainment Weekly, ”so we lashed Anjelica into a metal corset that created this hips-and-waist thing I’ve never seen any woman have in reality.” The role also required Huston to get gauze eye lifts, neck tucks, and fake nails daily. ”Come afternoon, I could be prone to a really good headache from my various bondages,” she told EW. ”And because I couldn’t lie down (in the corset) or rest, it was fairly exhausting.”

11. THE COMPANY FINANCING THE MOVIE SOLD IT WHILE IT WAS BEING FILMED.

Because Orion Pictures had the rights to The Addams Family, they were the ones responsible for financing and potentially releasing the movie. Even though there were some budget concerns, selling the movie to another company was something Rudin and Sonnenfeld had not even considered. But three-quarters of the way through filming, Rudin was informed that Orion had sold the movie to Paramount by Hollywood Reporter writer Andrea King. Even though Rudin was also working on a movie at the time with Paramount, in addition with having phone conversations daily with Orion over The Addams Family, he had absolutely no idea.

12. “VALLEY BOYS” CUT THE BIG MUSICAL NUMBER.

Initially “The Mamushka” scene was much longer, and it featured Gomez and Fester singing about brotherly love. Even though Broadway veterans were hired to write the traditional Addams clan number, most of the scene was cut because a California test audience mostly composed of 16- to 32-year-old white males didn’t care for it.

13. THE STUDIOS WERE SUED AS SOON AS THE MOVIE CAME OUT.

David Levy, the executive producer of the old Addams Family TV series, sued Paramount and Orion after the movie was released to surprising commercial success. Levy claimed that too many of his ideas, which were originally from his show and not from the Charles Addams cartoons, were used in the movie. Levy, who still owned the rights to the TV show, created specific character quirks and concepts that were used in the movie, such as Gomez’ love of blowing up toy trains, and Thing being a disembodied hand, as opposed to being a normal background character in the cartoons. Paramount and Levy ultimately settled out of court.


October 11, 2016 – 10:00pm

Lifeguard Builds Blimp to Scan Australian Beach for Sharks

Image credit: 
iStock

Australian lifeguard Kye Adams is using an old-school piece of aviation technology to spy on sharks from above. As reported by the Illawarra Mercury, project AIRSHIP (Aerial Inflatable Remote Shark Human Interaction Prevention) consists of a camera-equipped blimp used to spot sharks lurking offshore before they can do harm to swimmers.

The 16.4-foot craft took flight for the first time on Friday, October 7 above the waters of Surf Beach in Kiama, Australia. Using onboard survey cameras, the blimp relays real-time coverage of the ocean surface to a lifeguard-monitored laptop on land. If any shark-shaped shadows are seen swimming in the water, lifeguards can evacuate the beach before any unwanted shark-human interactions occur.

Kiama beachgoers are familiar with the threat posed by sharks: In March, a surfer sustained serious injuries when he was attacked roughly 300 feet offshore. On the other side of the continent, beaches in Western Australia are about to launch a three-month trial of a shark-spotting drone that will work similarly to Kye’s AIRSHIP. The major difference is cost: while $88,000 is being invested in the drone’s trial run, the blimp only costs $5000 plus $500 to $1000 a month for helium.

The shark-scanning blimp’s official test run is set to take place from late December though February, coinciding with Australia’s summer vacation season.

[h/t Illawarra Mercury]

Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.


October 11, 2016 – 2:30pm

101216 newsletter

Featured Story: 
Newsletter Item for (85178): 8 Rescue Dogs Who Became Stars
From the Editors: 
Newsletter Item for (85178): 8 Rescue Dogs Who Became Stars
Newsletter Item for (87263): New Law Aims to Transform Paris Into an Urban Jungle
Newsletter Item for (87083): 5 Ways to Prepare for Old Age When You're Young
Newsletter Item for (87176): The Drill We Sent to Mars
Newsletter Item for (86820): 10 Literary References in Cartoons You Might Have Missed
Newsletter Item for (87271): How Does a Breathalyzer Work?
The Grid: 
18 Celebrity Workout Videos You Might Not Know Existed
Watch Fireworks Explode Underwater at 120,000 Frames Per Second
18 Matching Halloween Costume Ideas for You and Your Dog
Meet the 19-Year-Old Student Who Builds Monster Trucks
Fun Fact Text: 

Jake Gyllenhaal auditioned to play Frodo in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. 

Fun Fact Image: 
Fun Fact Url: 
http://mentalfloss.com/article/73331/20-epic-facts-about-lord-rings-trilogy
Use Grid Ad: 
Scheduled Send: 
Fun Fact Caption: 
Youtube 
More Info Text: 

Dubai Breaks Ground on World’s Tallest Tower

Image credit: 
Emaar Properties

As of today, the Tokyo Sky Tree in Japan stands as the world’s tallest tower structure. The 2080-foot-tall construct, which opened in 2012, is said to be able to withstand 8.0 magnitude earthquakes, thanks to a shinbashira, or a central pendulum that acts as a counterbalance to the natural sway of the tower. If Dubai-based Emaar Properties and Dubai Holding have their way, that record won’t stand for long.

According to Business Insider, construction is set to begin on the Tower at Dubai Creek Harbour, an adjunct to a nearby residential area. Although no dimensions have been announced yet, Dubai said the structure is expected to surpass the Sky Tree to become the world’s tallest tower.

As defined by Guinness World Records, a tower differs from a skyscraper when it comes to usable floor space: a tower typically has 50 percent or less of its total height allocated for occupation. The largest skyscraper, the 2722-foot-tall Burj Kalifa, is also in Dubai, although UAE officials said the new tower will be even larger.

The Tower at Dubai Creek Harbour is expected to open in 2020.

[h/t Business Insider]


October 11, 2016 – 1:30pm