Word Origins for $100, Alex

Etymology is my all-time favorite Jeopardy! category, and a subject I could play with all day. (We're playing it for $100 because that's all Jeop! paid out for the first row of questions when I played in olden times...)

Btw, "etymology" (the study of words) comes from the Greek "etumon," the true meaning of a word; "entomology" (the study of bugs) comes from Greek "entomon," "insect." People seem to confuse the two and not to want to be disabused of their ignorance. I once had a boss who got mad at me for knowing the difference. Be prepared to wreck havoc.

Btw again, in Hebrew, the word for "word" is "davar," which is the same as the word for "thing." Words for me have corporeal existence, with tastes, colors, feels...If you can relate to that, you'll like Arthur Rimbaud's poem "Voyelles" ("Vowels"). It's probably kicking around on the Internet somewhere, so you can easily see what I mean.

Here's some etymology you might be able to use on a quiz show:

1) Influenza: There was once an outbreak of "a contagious distemper" in Rome in 1743. They called it "influenza" because they thought it was "influenced" by evil stars, and other occult "influences" were said to cause plague and pestilence. The Italian "influenza" became the English name for the disease. 

2) Mustard: I love Latin taxonomic names: Brassica nigra (the black mustard plant) and Brassica hirta (the white mustard plant) are the most commonly used in making mustard the condiment. When people used to make mustard, the paste for it was first mixed using "new wine," or "must." Frederick the Great drank a mixture of powdered mustard, champagne and coffee, believing it to be an early form of Viagra...

3) Caterpillar: This "wyrm among fruite," as the English once called it, is a "chatepelos" ("hairy cat") in French, from which our word derives. However, I love that the case isn't that simple: The word was modified in English because a "cater" was a glutton, and "to pill" (as in "pillage") meant "to strip or plunder," which is what caterpillars do to tree bark...

4) Planet: From Greek "planasthai," to wander, which is what they do. For some nostalgic reason, I'm sad to think that most of us will no longer be around about 200 years hence when Pluto once again wanders back inside Neptune's orbit to be the eighth planet from the Sun, as it did from 1979 to 1999...and no, I'm still mad at the International Astronomical Union for saying Pluto isn't a planet...and fortunately for him, composer Gustav Holst wrote "The Planets" long before Pluto was discovered in 1930, so he's off the hook not including it...

) Azalea: The ancient Greeks named it thus because they thought it only thrived in dry, sandy soil. They were wrong (as witness the azalea bushes all over muggy and buggy Central Florida), but their word for "dry," "azalea," stuck anyway.

My source is the fabulous "Facts On File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins." (I always cite my source...well, almost always...)

More helpings of Trivialicious coming your way.