Buzz
One of the reasons English has become so widespread is its openness to new words. In particular, the British and Irish take pleasure in coining new words or reimagining old ones. This list features eleven terms, mostly introduced or adapted over the past 40 years, which have become widely used despite their curious origins.
11. TWAIN
TWAIN is a communication standard used between imaging devices (typically scanners) and computers. Often written in all caps, it is mistakenly thought to be an acronym, with the “AIN” possibly standing for “acquired image network.” However, as explained on the twain.org website, the term ‘twain’ comes from Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Ballad of East and West,’ where the line “…and never the twain shall meet…” represented the difficulty of connecting a scanner to a computer. The term was capitalized to make it stand out more, leading to the recurring question: “What does TWAIN stand for?”
10. Whoop of Gorillas
While the official term for a group of gorillas is a “band of gorillas,” a new phrase, “whoop of gorillas,” is gaining traction in scientific literature. This term comes from a comedy sketch show called “Not the Nine O’Clock News,” specifically from the iconic sketch “Gerald the Gorilla.” It’s remarkable to think that a term in scientific writing can trace its origins to a comedy sketch starring Rowan Atkinson dressed as a gorilla.
You can watch the original sketch by searching for 'Gerald the Gorilla' on YouTube. This sketch aired on the BBC, a network so trusted that even a term coined in a comedic performance is regarded as legitimate.
10a. The same sketch also popularized the term “flange of baboons” as a collective noun, which is now also beginning to be used. This brings us smoothly to the next topic:
9. Flanger
In addition to being a new collective noun for baboons, the word “flange” also has a place in music production. A flanger is an effect created by combining two identical audio signals, with one of them being delayed slightly and fluctuating in time.
The creation of the flanging effect is commonly credited to Ken Townsend, an engineer at EMI’s Abbey Road studios, who developed it in 1966. The idea came about after a particularly challenging session trying to double-track vocals for a Beatles song. Double-tracking requires precise duplication of lyrics and phrasing, which can be difficult. John Lennon asked Townsend if there was a way to achieve the effect without recording the vocals twice. That evening, Townsend had an idea. He made a copy of the original vocal recording and played it alongside the first. By slightly varying the speed of the copied track (thanks to EMI's varispeed equipment), the flanging effect was born. Officially, the effect was called “artificial double tracking” or ADT, but when Lennon asked producer George Martin how it worked, Martin humorously explained, “we take the original image and we split it through a double-bifurcated splashing flange with double negative feedback.” From then on, whenever Lennon wanted the ADT effect, he asked for “Ken’s Flanger.” The Beatles’ immense influence—coupled with Lennon’s public praise of the effect—led to it being used on nearly every track of *Revolver* and *Sgt. Pepper*, and the name stuck.
There is an alternative theory that engineers used to press the flange wheel on the copied track to introduce the slight delay. While some may have tried this, considering the flange wheel rotated at over 20MPH, it might have been a bit risky!
8. Booting
To understand why we say we “boot” a computer, we must look back at Karl Friedrich Hieronymus, Freiherr von Münchhausen, more commonly known as Baron Münchhausen. Münchhausen, a member of the Russian cavalry during the 18th century Russo-Turkish wars, became famous after retirement for his humorous and highly exaggerated stories of his wartime feats. One of the most well-known tales was about him getting stuck in quicksand and supposedly escaping by pulling himself out by his own hair—an impossible feat.
These stories, initially published anonymously in 1781, evolved over the next century as they were added to, altered, and translated across Europe. By the time the tales reached America, the quicksand story had changed to Münchhausen supposedly pulling himself out by his bootstraps (another impossible act, and likely harder than using his hair).
Despite its absurdity, the phrase “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” endured. When computers were in their early stages, the process of starting one was quite involved. A small program would be loaded manually using switches on the machine's front panel. This would then load a larger program from a punched tape reader, which would eventually load the operating system from magnetic tape or disk. Since the computer was essentially starting from nothing and then becoming a fully functional machine, this process was referred to as bootstrapping, and eventually, just booting. Even today, modern computers follow a similar process—small programs (like the BIOS in PCs) help the computer access a boot disk, which contains the full operating system.
7. Wiki
Every day, millions of people visit Wikipedia, but Wikipedia is just one example of a “wiki” website—a type of site that allows users to easily and quickly modify its content.
The concept of a wiki website was pioneered by Howard G. Cunningham, who began developing it in 1994, with the first “WikiWikiWeb” going live on his site in 1995. But why did Cunningham choose the name “wiki”? It comes from the Hawaiian word for “fast” or “quick,” with “wikiwiki” meaning “very fast.” Cunningham recalled being told to take the “Wiki Wiki Shuttle” by an employee at Honolulu Airport, leading him to choose the name “wiki-wiki” instead of calling the platform something like “quick-web.”
6. Epson
As a young child, I vividly remember watching the Tokyo Olympics. These were the first games ever broadcast internationally via satellite, so it was truly amazing to see “live” events from the other side of the world.
A lesser-known technological breakthrough from the Tokyo Olympics was the creation of the electronic printer used to print the results times. Developed by the Seiko Group, this printer was called the “Electronic Printer” or “EP.” The printer was so successful that it was later integrated into early calculators. About a decade later, Seiko introduced a line of dot matrix printers to the U.S. market, and the distributor was named EPSON, as the printers were the “son” of the original “EP.” The brand became so synonymous with the product that Seiko eventually renamed itself the Epson Corporation.
5. Bluetooth
Bluetooth is a short-range radio technology used to exchange data over small distances. But why the name “Bluetooth”? The answer lies in history: “Bluetooth” refers to King Harald 1 of Denmark, a 10th-century ruler known for having blue—or perhaps black—teeth. The connection becomes clearer when we learn that Bluetooth was developed by Erion, a Swedish telecom company familiar with the Nordic king’s legacy. Harald’s greatest feat was uniting Denmark and Norway under one rule, and in much the same way, Bluetooth was designed to unite different devices using a single communication protocol.
The system was originally going to be named Pan, presumably to reflect its ability to transcend boundaries (as in Pan-Continental), but just before its launch, it was discovered that the name Pan was already trademarked. As a result, Bluetooth was quickly adopted as a replacement.
4. Robotics
While the concept of automata—mechanical people or animals—has existed for centuries (even appearing in stories such as mechanical horses in the Arabian Nights), the term “Robot” was not introduced until 1920 by Karel Čapek. Čapek coined the word in his play *Rossum’s Universal Robots*, where it was derived from the Czech word for “serf worker” or “drudgery” (though Karel credited the term to his brother Josef).
So far, so strange, but the term “robotics” has an even more unusual origin. It was first coined by science fiction author Isaac Asimov in his 1942 short story *Runaround*. Asimov was both proud and amazed when he realized that the term had been adopted by those actually building real robots, many of whom had been inspired by his robot-themed stories.
3. Spam
Next up, the second (or third, if you count ‘a whoop of baboons,’ which I personally prefer) word that comes from a comedy sketch—the iconic “Spam” sketch from *Monty Python’s Flying Circus*.
The sketch is easy to find on YouTube and is set in a café where nearly every dish includes spam, with most items featuring multiple servings—like “…egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam…” As the waitress rattles off the menu, a group of Vikings at another table starts chanting “spam, spam, spam, spam.”
As fate would have it, the *Spam* sketch aired a few years before the early days of online networking, which relied on dial-up phone connections running at speeds of 1200 or even 300 characters per second. During this time, it became a popular joke to repeatedly send the word ‘Spam’ until the receiver’s screen was filled with it—this amusing activity became known as ‘spamming.’
Now the origin of the term gets a bit hazy, because in the 1980s, companies responsible for the crucial task of bulk posting unsolicited ads referred to their content as SPAM—an acronym for “Sales, Promotion And Marketing.”
As the Internet spread, the two meanings of ‘Spam’ began to blend together, and it eventually came to represent junk emails flooding inboxes. But when I see the term, I still picture Terry Jones in a dress, muttering “bloody Vikings!” as the Spam chant becomes too much to bear.
2. Wi-fi
Wi-fi, the omnipresent wireless technology – a quick scan for Wi-fi networks in any UK street will likely reveal at least half a dozen hosts – is sometimes called ‘wireless-fidelity.’
But that doesn’t quite make sense. The term ‘hi-fi,’ a contraction of high-fidelity, has a more precise definition. Technically, only equipment meeting the DIN 45500 standard could use the term ‘hi-fi’ (though in reality, ‘hi-fi’ is applied to almost anything that produces sound). When consultants at Interbrand were tasked with creating a name for a new system, they came up with ‘wi-fi’ as a playful take on ‘hi-fi.’ While ‘wi-fi’ might seem like a shorthand for ‘wireless-fidelity,’ it isn’t really—‘wi-fi’ is just a phrase that resembles another phrase, ‘high-fidelity.’
1. Cyberspace
The term ‘Cyberspace,’ another science fiction creation, was first introduced by William Gibson in his 1982 short story *Burning Chrome*. Cyberspace carries an almost eerie vibe, and Gibson is also credited with predicting the rise of reality TV and the virtual worlds that would dominate certain video games.
